


The House of the Rising Sun

by passive_phantom



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Exy (All For The Game), Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Gen, Healing, M/M, New Orleans, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Southern and gothic undertones, Supernatural Elements, Superstition, Trauma, dark Romanticism, some violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:35:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25274008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/passive_phantom/pseuds/passive_phantom
Summary: There is a house in New Orleans, it’s called the Rising Sun. It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God, I know I’m one.-The House of the Rising Sun, MuseDeep within the Lilac District of New Orleans, between the cypress trees and Spanish moss, lurks a house of shadows. When secrets begin to spill out of its darkness - grotesque, slippery things borne of cruelty and unchecked greed - its very foundations begin to crumble.Jeremy is struggling to keep his family afloat. Kevin is desperate for an escape. Jean just wants it all to stop. Between the lies, and broken promises, they each begin to unravel the past. The only problem is that everything comes at a price.A storm is brewing on the horizon, and it's only a matter of time before it makes landfall. The question is: who will be left standing when it's over?
Relationships: Alvarez/Laila Dermott, Jeremy Knox/Jean Moreau, Kevin Day/Jean Moreau, Kevin Day/Jeremy Knox, Kevin Day/Jeremy Knox/Jean Moreau, Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 11
Kudos: 19





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> ***Archive Warnings: I marked archive warnings don't apply since there is nothing I’d consider graphic violence in this, and overall, this fic contains less than canon-typical levels of violence.   
> As always, detailed content warnings are tagged in individual chapter notes! 
> 
> ***Translation Notes: I'll add any French to English bits in the end notes of each chapter, but if I miss any snippets of dialogue, let me know and I'll add them!

The streets in the Lilac District are all meticulously manicured. 

In the better-off parts of New Orleans, where the homes are three stories tall with sprawling yards, the tree of choice is the magnolia. They’re majestic, fragrant, beautiful trees that weep pink-stained petals in the spring.

But in the Lilac District - the unfortunate southernmost pocket of New Orleans, separated from the rest of the city by a branch of the Mississippi River - there aren’t any magnolias, not unless you know where to look. For the most part, the trees in the Lilac District are much more utilitarian: slash pine, live oak, cypress, willow. They’re still majestic, still ancient, but they don’t compare with the magnolias of the wealthier parts of the city. They’re too angular. Instead of soft browns and pinks, they’re splashes of violent green and bark that’s almost black when it rains. 

Most people think that’s all there is to the Lilac District, because it’s a place where good things rarely flourish.

That’s what Jean remembers from growing up in the Lilac District. Not that he grew up there exactly, but it’s easier to pretend that the time before New Orleans simply doesn’t exist. There was never a time when he ran barefoot on the beaches of Marseilles, splashing through waves that were too cold to swim in. There was never a time when his mother tucked him into bed and brushed his hair back from his forehead to kiss him before turning off the light. Never a time that he visited the Alps and wondered at the vast expanse of countyside before him and though: _c'est le nôtre_. No, it’s easier to pretend that there was no light, no hope, no _before_.

The point is this: the Lilac District has a reputation, and it isn’t a good one. There aren’t many good parts - arguably, there are _no_ good parts - but there is only one place you can find magnolia trees in the Lilac District. 

On Lilac Street. 

Amidst the cypress and Spanish moss and leggy ferns, there is a stretch of pavement that's framed by rows of ancient magnolias. The view is breathtaking. In the spring, rows of gleaming cars trundle down the dead-end street, dusted white with petals by the time they reach their destination: the House of the Rising Sun. 

But they are invited, and rarely anyone ends up on Lilac Street without an invitation, so the magnolias of the Lilac District remain a well-kept secret. 

You see, Monsieur R owns most of the properties on Lilac Street. There’s the corner store - Riko's Fresh Market, its sign written in red neon cursive lights - and the apartment house, appropriately named the Lilac House, since it's painted a shade of pale lilac purple. Beyond that sits a row of single-family homes that Monsieur R rents to the wealthier families of the Lilac District. And an empty lot between the Fresh Market and the Lilac House was converted into a tiny community park a few years back, which everyone refers to as Lilac Park.

Some residents insist that Monsieur R planted the magnolias, but that would be impossible. His family only moved to New Orleans a decade ago at most, and the magnolias on Lilac Street are all at least a century old. Some, it seems, are older than all of the inhabitants of Lilac Street combined. Certainly older than Monsieur R. But still, the rumors exist, baselessly. That’s how rumors work, after all.

But no matter who planted them, those magnolias belong to Monsieur R now. Every spring, he drives his Cadillac right down the middle of Lilac Street at a snail's pace, dark sunglasses perched on his nose as magnolia petals flutter down around him in slow-motion. They catch on the hood of his Cadillac, a satin green beast, and when he steps out, they settle in his hair like a crown. When Monsieur R drives by, men stop mowing their lawns. Women hush crying babies, and children stop throwing balls into the road. Dogs go quiet, birds stop chirping. Every living thing in the Lilac District feels the arrival of the man who runs this tiny world: their unofficial king. 

But that’s the funny thing about Lilac Street. It’s a strange place, with no lilacs and too many magnolias and a king without a real crown.

Sometimes, Jean wonders if the person who named the Lilac District had a morbid sense of humor, naming the district after a flower that symbolizes purity and innocence. If you asked someone why or when they’d started calling it the Lilac District, you’d get a vague, _I don’t know, darling_ , and a confused smile, a nervous laugh. 

By the time the little Moreau family moved to the Lilac District, it was as if the place had never been known by any other name.

Jean had certainly only ever known it as such.

His parents had rented the little white clapboard house nearest the dead-end portion of the street, right next to the House of the Rising Sun. There was a magnolia tree in their front yard that blossomed in March and lost its petals in April and turned a satisfying green for the rest of the summer. On sticky July evenings, when the music from the House of the Rising Sun kept him awake, Jean would sneak out to the backyard in his pajamas. He’d lay beneath the branches of the magnolia in his thin shorts and threadbare t-shirt, all soaked through with sweat, and he’d listen to the distant hum of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, all played on a crackling turntable in the house next door. He’d pretend that he spoke perfect English like the men coming and going from the Rising Sun. He’d pretend that his bedroom wasn’t the size of a postage stamp, that he didn’t have to watch his father count out the last few dollars every month to see if they could pay for both groceries and electricity. 

Instead, he imagined living at the Rising Sun, where men arrived wearing suits and laughing boisterously with (or _at)_ each other, where women sat on the veranda after dark passing cigarettes back and forth, staring out over Lilac Street with dark wisdom in their eyes. 

To the little French boy who had never seen such a grand house with shutters that closed during hurricanes, with peonies lining the front walk and roses tresseled up the siding, it was marvelous to lay in the grass and listen to the sounds of jazz and rock-and-roll in the middle of the night and realize that he could exist in the same world as the Rising Sun, even if sometimes it felt like an ocean divided his little family home from the enormous estate next door. 

In that sense, the Rising Sun was, to Jean Moreau, a little like a dream. 

Some nights, it would be bustling with activity. There was never rhyme or reason to the going-ons there: weekends, weekdays, it didn't matter. And sometimes the house would lie dormant for what seemed like weeks on end.

But it always came back to life eventually. Someone would pull the shutters back, prop the doors open, and lift the window sashes to let out the stagnant air. 

And then Monsieur R’s guests would return. 

On those days, Jean watched every manner of person and car arrive with rapt attention. They spoke languages Jean had never heard before, and drove cars he'd never seen: Cadillacs, Fords, Chevrolets, Pontiacs, all like shining beetles glinting in the New Orleans sun. Sometimes, he tried to imagine what went on inside the house. He imagined the girls and the alcohol and, probably, the drugs. He imagined open rooms with ceilings draped in silk, and fronds of lilac hung from the windows to perfume each room as a humid breeze passed through. He imagined what kind of fortune a man must possess to own a house as brilliant as the Rising Sun.

Jean desperately wished to be a part of that world, where men drove up in freshly waxed Firebirds and Mustangs with cigars dangling from their mouths, where they sat on the veranda with a drink in hand, the glass tinged blue in the dusky light, ice clinking against the glass. 

But as he grew older, he started to see the darker side of the Rising Sun; it was impossible not to, living in its shadow. The gardeners, whose hands would bleed from fighting the roses into perfect formations on the trellises. The cleaners, whose backs would ache from beating dust out of the drapes and carpets and couch cushions after every party. The caterers, whose hands would blister from burns on hot pans. 

Yet Jean never imagined he’d find out about the going-ons inside the house firsthand. One day, once he’d saved up enough money, he had planned to move away from his parent’s home on Lilac Street. He would look back and fondly remember the nights laying on the lawn while listening to the fizz and pop of a record playing from across the way, the buzz of mosquitoes a different kind of music for his soul to reminisce upon. 

But then his world turned upside down, and the Rising Sun became his entire life.

It had started as an unremarkable day - March 21st, he would never forget - full of rain and cloudy skies, which was standard for spring in New Orleans. That entire March was particularly rainy. 

His father had left almost three weeks prior for an extended business trip to Paris, and he was due to return that afternoon at three. His mother had spoken with him over the phone the previous night: long-distance-collect to Paris, just to confirm the flight was still going ahead as scheduled.

But three o’clock came and went with no sign of the oldest Moreau, and Jean and his mother continued sitting in their front yard beneath a blossoming magnolia tree, patiently awaiting his return. Slowly, their patient waiting morphed into nervous waiting. By evening, his mother was panicking and they’d both ended up pacing along the sidewalk.

“ _Il va bien_ ,” Jean said to her as they both stood on the front curb, straining to peer down Lilac Street to see if a cab was on its way. Any second now they'd realize the flight had been delayed, and Jacques would materialize in front of them unscathed with an armful of French books from the little stands that lined Parisian streets. 

Jean glanced at his watch, checking the time. He was supposed to be at Soto’s for work in an hour - at seven sharp - but it was worth being late to see his father. Despite dreaming of one day moving away from his parents, he found himself glued to them after graduating high school the year prior, and not seeing his father for three weeks had been unsettling. (It didn’t help that his mother was fiercely protective of him, and even after living in New Orleans for the past few years, he had little to no real friends. Living next to the Rising Sun inexplicably had a chilling effect on every acquaintance he'd tried to befriend.)

“ _Bien sûr,_ ” his mother said, patting Jean's arm as she stood besides him.

He couldn’t remember what happened next. Not the exact order, at least, or who had done what. But it started with one of them calling the airport on the old phone in their kitchen. One of them - maybe his mother, maybe Jean himself - had said, _je ne comprends pas_ to the operator. Someone said, _he wouldn’t leave us_. Someone said, _maybe his flight changed_. Someone pulled down two tall glasses from the cupboard and filled them with water fresh from the tap, topped off with ice from the icebox that clinked like chimes with each sip. Condensation beaded down the side of Jean's glass, pooling in a ring on his mother's tablecloth. 

Out of everything that happened on March 21st, the only memory Jean can recall in perfect detail is that exact moment: his glass, a couple of ice cubes, a single droplet of water sliding down the glass towards the table, a pink floral cloth underneath, his hands laying palm-face up as if to say _what more can I do?_ , the feeling of sinking dread creeping up the back of his throat. 

If he really tried to put things in order chronologically, the knock at the door came sometime after that single crystal-clear memory. 

It wasn't important which one of them answered it. All that mattered was who stood on the other side: Monsieur R, with his hair slicked-back and his smile curling to bare his teeth like a snarling dog. 

“It appears your father has been engaged for the foreseeable future in Paris,” he said to Jean. Then, to Jean’s mother, “Madame Moreau, your flight to Paris has already been arranged.”

Jean turned to his mother, surely to watch her tell Monsieur R there had been some kind of mistake. His father worked for Monsieur R's business in the Northern District, on the other side of the Mississippi, but he was an accountant. Jean had seen his office on Blanchard Street, a nondescript brick building sandwiched between abandoned shopfronts. When they'd first moved to New Orleans, Jean had spent his afternoons in that office while his mother finished working at the laundromat down the street. He and his father sat across from each other at the desk wearing twin serious expressions. Jean would punch numbers into the calculator to double-check his father's work and feel very self-important. 

Monsieur Moreau was, by all accounts, a gentle man. His hands knew nothing of hard work, and his role in Monsieur R's business could have been described as _expendable_ , but that also meant it could be described as harmless. Accountants, as a breed, were boring people. And boring people didn't disappear after three-week-long business trips and send their employers to their doorsteps to inform their families of their absence. 

If either Jean or his mother had been thinking critically about Monsieur Moreau's three-week trip to Paris, they would've realized long ago that accountants for local businesses in New Orleans didn't get sent to Paris for extended business. 

Then again, maybe Jean had been the only one who hadn't been thinking critically. As he turned to face his mother, her expression was distraught but far from surprised. She wore the look of a woman who had seen disaster approaching long ago and was now rising to face the inevitable fallout.

What Jean hadn't understood at the time was that Monsieur R was not his father's employer.

He was a god. Not in the literal sense (though he might as well have taken the title), but in the sense that his reputation preceded him, cloaked in mystery and rumor. Whispers were slippery things on Lilac Street, but Jean had caught the loudest ones: _Monsieur R locked the girls in his basement at night. He killed his entire family to inherit his father's fortune. He built that house on a graveyard. The land was cursed. His family was cursed. Monsieur R was cursed. The Lilac District was cursed_. 

Monsieur R's reputation hinged on his power, which came from the place itself. He was the human manifestation of the Rising Sun. His music, dreamily floating through the open windows of the house, was the very heartbeat of their street. His magnolias bled white and pink when he drove by, dropping petals in his wake as an offering. Even the sun seemed to set by his command, directly behind the Rising Sun, silhouetting its pointed rooftop against an orange sky every night. It was magic and natural, how Lilac Street lived and breathed, how impossible to imagine one without the other. 

“ _Mais Jean_ -” His mother had started to protest, and Monsieur R held out his hand in a gesture that was both chilling and chivalrous. 

“Come. Walk with me, Madame,” he said, and Jean's mother did, with shaking hands.

Jean trailed behind them, carefully watching Monsieur R’s fingers as they barely ghosted against his mother’s elbow. 

“You know Jacques has been struggling with his work lately. New Orleans was never his style, he never hit his stride here. But Paris - oh, Paris, Madame Moreau - it’s the City of Lights! He’s very excited to begin his work there. It’s a whole new market - a whole new business. It’s what your family needs.”

“ _Ma famille_ \- my family is my business, not yours,” his mother said in a trembling voice.

Monsieur R tutted and patted her arm with his hand. “How charming. I think you’ve misunderstood, darling. Your family is quite literally my business. You will join your husband in France. And your precious son will remain with me in New Orleans as collateral until your amour gets his act together. This -” he spun his finger in a circle, a gesture to encompass their tiny house, the white clapboard siding, the blue shutters, the gingham curtains fluttering in the breeze, the mailbox overflowing with Sears catalogues and weekly circulars from the grocery, “- _this_ , Madame, comes at a price, and I have come to collect.”

Then, Monsieur R turned to Jean with a smile that could kill. “ _This_ ,” a man materialized at Jean’s shoulder and clamped down with a giant hand, “Belongs to me now.”

Of course Jean had tried to run. His mother had cried, another man materialized out of thin air and hit her, another one grabbed Jean. It was a mess of hands and knees and along the way a knife sliced Jean’s neck, a gash that started to bleed down his front. Seconds later, Jean had torn the knife from his attacker’s hand and flung it towards the sewer grate. He pulled his arm back to punch his assailant when the press of a gun against his temple, the soft click of the safety being switched off, made him freeze in place.

"It's time to stop this nonsense," Monsieur R said in a cool voice. "You will both do as I say. Madeline, you will get in the car to join your husband. Jean, you will return with me to the Rising Sun. Your place at my side ensures that your father can repay his debt. If you disobey, if you try to run or contact your parents, I will not extend the same courtesy I am offering right now. Ask your mother what will happen if you do not behave.”

Jean turned towards his mother as the cold burn of the gun pressing further into his temple sent his heartbeat into a frenzy. 

“ _Maman_ -”

“ _Non_ ,” she said, her face pained and pale. “Not in French, _mon fils_. He will not hesitate to kill you, Jean. Understand? Do as he says, and it will not be so bad.”

“ _Non, maman, je n’ai_ -”

“Promise me, Jean. He will keep you safe if you follow his rules. I know you will survive without us here. One day -” Her voice cracked, and Monsieur R stepped between them. Somewhere in the chaos, his green Cadillac had pulled up on the curb, and his mother was being dragged into the back seat by another strange man. 

“ _Promets-moi!"_ His mother yelled before the door was slammed shut between them. 

There was no time for Jean to promise. In fact, there had been nothing he could do as he watched her face press to the glass as she shouted something incoherent as the car pulled off of the curb. 

“I suggest you take your mother’s advice. If you do not ...” Monsieur R waved the gun haphazardly towards the Cadillac, which disappeared around a corner. “You will learn. The easy way, or the hard way.” 

Jean stumbled as one of the large men half-dragged him up the porch. He tripped over his own feet, his vision blurred by hysteria, his throat closing up. He’d thought it was a joke. He’d thought it was a mistake. 

“I need to go to work,” he said to Monsieur R. “My shift starts soon, I'm going to be late.”

Monsieur R was following from a safe distance, and the gun was nowhere to be seen. 

“You are quite slow, aren't you? You don’t work at Soto’s any more. You work for me,” Monsieur R said with a cruel laugh as the men shoved Jean over the threshold of the house that Jean had so desperately wished to become a part of. Never mind the fact that Monsieur R shouldn’t know that Jean worked at Soto’s. 

Entering the House of the Rising Sun for the first time had been surreal. He’d spent his teenage years wondering what went on there, but as soon as he was inside, he wanted to leave. The interior smelled of too-thick smoke and stale liquor that lingered in the burgundy velvet curtains. Even though it was mid-afternoon, only a sliver of light crept in. In the foyer, matching black velvet chaise lounges were placed opposite each other, with a blue floral chair perched in the corner. Heavy mahogany bookshelves lined the walls, filled with leather-bound books and trinkets and vials containing bleached bones and tiny crystal orbs. 

“Take him to his new room,” Monsieur R said with a wave of his hand, and one of the guards pushed Jean towards an enormous staircase. “But let him clean up first.”

Jean stumbled once, twice, on the stairs. He caught himself on the banister, which was carved opulently from dark wood, and he tried not to stare at the pictures hung along the wall. Each frame held a single photo of a naked woman, and Jean found himself tripping again as he almost stumbled into a man standing at the top of the staircase.

“New blood?” The man asked, reaching forward to tilt Jean’s chin up with a calloused hand.

For a moment, Jean was sure this man would hurt him. His gaze was cold and dark, his green eyes almost black with hatred, his hair hanging dark and limp in his eyes, dark circles under his eyes. Jean tried to recoil, but the fingers grasping his chin dug in tighter, keeping him in place. “A free word of advice for you: forget who you were before you walked through these doors. You’ll never be that person again.”

The man let go of Jean’s face then, and he would’ve stumbled down the stairs if not for the guard still standing behind him.

The rest of his first night was a blur. At some point, he was stripped and searched and shoved into a small bathroom, where his panic and confusion only intensified into an emotion he could only vaguely recognize as hysteria. His reflection was unrecognizable from a few hours before. Instead of bright eyes, dark hair, and red cheeks, his face was pale and mottled with bruises that stretched across the entire left side of his face. The bridge of his nose was swollen badly, and it hurt to touch. Dried blood mixed with fresh blood as he sponged at it, cataloging each injury. His nose was probably broken, and there were two long gashes down the side of his neck that he vaguely felt should be worrying. Each one extended from his ear towards his collarbone, and the longer of the two stretched over his clavicle. The shorter stopped just at the apex of his throat. 

He used the sink to wash whatever exposed skin he could with cupped hands, and re-dressed in all-black clothes that had been provided to him (complete with long sleeves despite the heat), and a pair of black leather gloves that came with an accompanying command: keep these on at all times. There were no bandages for him, something he would quickly come to learn was standard at the Rising Sun. Punishment was dealt generously by Monsieur R’s hand, and the subsequent recovery was expected to occur quietly and quickly behind closed doors, without help. 

For the first time in his life, Jean was alone and afraid. He’d never spent time away from his parents, and was terrified that Monsieur R would hurt them if he didn’t cooperate. He was terrified that the man from earlier with the dark eyes would appear in his doorway and claw his chest open, dig out his heart during the night. He had images of the guard who'd locked him inside coming back to drag Jean downstairs, throwing him at Monsieur R’s feet to be shot between the eyes. 

That first night, locked in a strange room in a strange house, Jean dreamt of shark-tooth smiles and the vials of bleach-white bones from the bookshelves downstairs. He dreamt of guns the color of midnight and bullets burrowing into his skull. He dreamt of knives catching at the skin on his throat and blood choking him until he was blue-faced. Each nightmare was worse than the last. 

But when he woke the next morning to his new reality at the Rising Sun, he wished for the first time in his life that he was dead. 

\-----

As it turned out, March 21st was a busy night. 

After Madeline had been sent away in a car, after Jean had been shoved into the upstairs room, if anyone at the House of the Rising Sun had bothered to look out the front window, they would've seen a grey sedan parked halfway down Lilac Street. They would've seen a boy who looked too young to drive, with a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel. 

He was waiting, as instructed.

_“If I'm not back in twenty five minutes ...”_

The clock passed 9:25, then 9:30. It passed 9:45,10:00. It had been an hour well past the twenty-five minute mark, but the boy couldn't drive away yet. His fingers worried the necklace around his throat, a nervous habit. 

_Just one more minute,_ the boy told himself. _He'll be back any second now_. 

Eventually - at 11:02, to be precise - he talked himself into leaving. He twisted the key in the ignition and the engine sprang to life. It idled in the dark for a few seconds as he held his breath, waiting for a sign. Music still wafted down the street like a siren song, calling him inside, but he stayed glued to his seat. 

His father had taught him to drive in this car.

_"Put your hand on the gearshift. Left foot on the clutch - no, that's brake. Do you even know which one the clutch is?”_

_“Stopstopstop, dad I know. I know, okay?”_

_“Don't forget to press the brake. The brake. No - that's the gas.”_

_“I have it, okay dad?”_

_“Put it in first, then. Without stalling.”_

The first time he'd done it - started the car, shifted into first, pulled out into traffic without stalling once - he'd immediately looked over to his father with a grin. His father slapped the dash and yelled, _eyes on the road, eyes on the fucking road, Jeremy!_ , but even as his father yelled, he was grinning back just as widely. 

Everyone always said Jeremy looked just like his father. 

The engine purred, still in neutral. He couldn't leave his father here, but what choice was left?

_I'm sorry, dad._

Everything was muscle memory - the clutch, the brake, the gearshift, the feel of the gas pedal pressing down under his foot. He adjusted the rear view mirror as he turned the car around, watching behind him as the House of the Rising Sun slowly grew smaller and smaller until it was just a speck at the end of Lilac Street and his father’s words haunted him all the way home.

_If I'm not back in twenty five minutes, go home. Don't talk to anyone. Take care of your brother and sisters. Help your mother. Keep your head down._

_And forget everything you think you know about the House of the Rising Sun._   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation notes:  
> C'est le nôtre = It's ours/it belongs to us.  
> Il va bien = He's fine.  
> Bien sûr = Of course.  
> Je ne comprends pas = I don't understand.  
> Mais Jean = But Jean.  
> Ma famille = My family.  
> Mon fils = My son.  
> Promets-moi = Promise me.


	2. La Malchance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome back to the rising sun where the night never ends :)

Jean sits at the top of the grand staircase, his face pressed to the cool wood of the banister. He never liked this part of living in New Orleans - the oppressive, year-round humidity and heat. There’s a slight reprieve during the winter if they’re lucky, but it’s March and Jean’s thighs are sticking together with sweat _._ It isn't natural for the temperature to be over seventy degrees after midnight during this time of year. Sometimes, he imagines the devil himself lives in the basement of the Rising Sun, his eternal flames licking up through the floorboards to send them all into a feverish delirium. It doesn’t feel too far from the truth right now. 

“Long day, Moreau?” A voice says behind him. 

He glances up to find Kevin perched on the window seat, his feet tucked beneath him. He’s in all black - like everyone at the Rising Sun - but Kevin wears it like armor. Jean wears it like a weight tied around his throat. Kevin’s nails click nervously against the window frame as he stares out over the front lawn. The magnolia trees are budding early - a result of the mild winter, probably, combined with the current heat wave - a March heatwave. A blistering, hot thing. Eighty degrees in the afternoon yesterday, eighty-four today. Jean heard the radio playing in the kitchen early, static and fuzzy voices calling out: _Tomorrow's gonna be an even hotter one, folks! High of eighty-nine, with a low of seventy two. We might see some rain clouds rolling in on Thursday evening …_

Jean shrugs in response to Kevin’s question. All of his days are long; Kevin knows this. 

“You can come to mine for a drink after. If you want,” Kevin offers. 

It’s tempting. Kevin always keeps a few small bottles of whatever he can steal from the kitchen under his mattress. Lately, it’s been absinthe. Jean hates the taste, hates the burn of it down his throat, but he loves the floating feeling, the mind-body detachment he experiences when he’s drunk. It makes everything else easier. And at the very least, absinthe is a little better than the vodka Kevin usually prefers, so he can't exactly complain.

“How about now?” He says, trying not to let any of his eagerness creep into his voice.

“You sure?” Kevin asks, and his fingers stop tapping on the wood. “That’s a good idea?” 

Jean shrugs again. There are no good ideas in the House of the Rising Sun. There are only bad ones, and worse ones. He thinks this is just a regular bad idea.

“Fine,” Kevin huffs out after a moment’s pause. “But if you get caught -”

“I won’t,” Jean assures him, and then he follows Kevin to his bedroom.

Kevin’s room is just off of the grand staircase, close to the entry for easy access. It’s got a double bed with silk sheets and a goose-down duvet for the non-existent chill. Everything is black and red - Monsieur R’s signature colors. Red silk, black lace, red satin, black cotton. 

“Here,” Kevin says, pulling a small green bottle from under his mattress. 

Jean downs it in a matter of seconds and hides the empty bottle in the bottom of Kevin’s wastebasket. He takes a moment to appreciate the quiet wash of moonlight across the room - the tall windows, the red velvet drapes, the wallpaper patterned with red roses, thorny things that bleed droplets of black liquid down the walls. The House of the Rising Sun - the actual house itself - is a work of art. It’s a theatre for all who enter. Kevin’s room is a carefully manicured stage, curated entirely by Monsieur R, and the only part of it that belongs to Kevin alone is the trail of dried leaves scattered across the windowsill. And the only reason those haven’t been removed would be that Monsieur R either hasn't noticed them or doesn't care. It's likely the former, as Monsieur R is too preoccupied with the boy caged within the room to notice a bit of innocuous leaf litter; he likely thinks it’s an oversight of one of the cleaning staff. After all, Kevin wouldn’t do anything nefarious in his own room, right?

Before Jean can thank Kevin properly for the absinthe or tell Kevin to be more careful about the herbs across his window, there’s a knock at the door.

“John,” Marcus - Monsieur R's right-hand-man - says, “Let’s go.”

Kevin presses a hand to Jean’s shoulder as he passes, their own quiet symbol for _good luck._ Again, not that there’s any such thing as luck, and even if there was, Jean’s would only be _bad._

 _La Malchance._ That's actually what Jean calls himself when he’s performing. He suspects Monsieur R only allows it because it fits into the aura of the house. But there is power in a name, and Jean clings to what little hope he can find. 

If knew how to, he’d curse every client that came through his doors. He'd damn them to hell and hand them to the devil himself, sitting just down the hall in a silk jacket, cigarette pinched between two long fingers. But Jean is powerless in a house of powerful people. Unlike the rest of the staff at the Rising Sun, Jean is here by mistake. He’s not a mind reader or soothsayer or fortune teller. Jean doesn’t even believe in magic, but he plays the part of dutiful palm-reader every Thursday night at Monsieur R’s request (although _request_ implies choice; Jean knows this is an illusion, and the request is really a command). 

Still, Jean doesn’t need to believe in magic to dream of burning this entire house to the ground. Some nights, like tonight, he swears he can feel the heat of the flames on the back of his neck, the sweat beading on his forehead as he gets closer to the source of the flames.

The first time he dreamt that the Rising Sun was burning, he was watching from inside his old house. The little white clapboard house right next door. The second time he had the dream, he was inside the Rising Sun when it caught fire. He stood in the flames and let them lick over his skin until it started to slough off of him, leaving behind nothing but ash and bone. Now, it’s not even a dream. It’s more like a living memory, or a waking nightmare, something that floats just beyond the edges of his field of vision when he stands in the middle of the foyer and breathes in invisible smoke. Today, it feels more real than not as Jean pauses at the top of the grand staircase. For a moment, he envisions the flames spreading across the foyer below, crawling across the rug and up the curtains.

"John," Marcus repeats, nudging Jean with his shoulder. There’s a different kind of power in that name, a name that isn’t his, a name that he hates. But it does the trick, and Jean’s anger distracts him from the imagined flames. He blinks a few times, until the heat on his neck subsides, until the flames below are gone and the ghostly wisps of smoke disappear. The foyer is unchanged, the Persian rug still faded but intact, the leaded glass windows clear from any traces of smoke. 

When Jean finally moves down the staircase, he steps lightly. All that separates him from the rest of this nightmare is thirty-two steps; he's counted. His Thursday night routine starts with these thirty-two stairs. Each one takes him closer to the crowd of guests below, the chatter of over-confident men all too willing to pay for a variety of fraudulent supernatural services at the Rising Sun. 

Marcus leads Jean through the crowd. The room where he performs is at the back of the house, but his act has already begun. His fingers are sweating beneath the black leather gloves he’s required to wear, and the starched collar of his black shirt is too tight against his throat. Marcus takes his time walking Jean past the waiting crowd, always leading him along the longest route possible to the back of the house, and the men’s eyes follow Jean hungrily. Occasionally, a hand will rest on his shoulder or trail down his back. They never touch his skin, which is a small mercy, but that doesn’t make their touch less repulsive. Jean blocks out the feeling of hands grabbing, hands taking, hands _touching_ and pulling and violating. He focuses on the steady rise and fall of the light in the room, which seems to pulse in time to the music. An old turntable in the corner is playing something jazzy that Jean can’t hear above the buzzing in his own ears. The room vibrates around him as he tries to drown out the nauseous feeling he gets every night that he performs.

One of Monsieur R’s girls passes with a tray of sparkling glasses. Each one fizzes in the golden light, and he is tempted to take one. He doesn’t, though, because Marcus has stopped and pulled back the curtain to Jean’s room. Like every room Jean inhabits at the Rising Sun, it is windowless and black. The curtain, the walls, even the table, are all black. Jean slips inside and Marcus lets the curtain fall shut. Marcus stays outside the room, never entering, never pulling back the curtain unless it’s to allow a client inside. Jean doesn’t have control over much in his life, but for a few moments, it feels like this space belongs to him. The darkness belongs to him. Sometimes, he pretends that this is what death feels like: a complete absence of light.

This is a dangerous game that he plays with himself. He doesn’t dare bask in the floating feeling that starts to tug at his limbs, because he knows if he gives in to it, he won’t want to come back to his own body quite the same, if he comes back at all. As much as his body has endured - the scars, the beatings, the burns and cuts and bruises - his mind has endured worse, and it’s been reduced to a fragile thing that threatens to slip the leash if Jean isn’t careful. On nights like tonight, when he is a little drunk, a little lonely, a little sad, he could easily do something stupid.

He doesn’t. Not tonight, at least. 

There’s only a few minutes until his first client comes in, and he begins a routine he knows by heart. He takes off his gloves and lights a match. It burns slowly, the flame taking an impossibly long time to crawl towards his fingers. Some days, he lights the candle and snuffs the match out with brute efficiency. Today, he lets it burn all the way up to his fingertips before he shakes it out. It barely singes his fingers, and the pain connects him to his body again, counteracting the absinthe running through his veins and the darkness swirling in his mind. To survive this night, to survive _any_ night, he needs to be present. By the time he’s lit a second match, he feels like he’s floating away again. 

Before he does something truly reckless, he lights the candle and shakes out the second match. Light begins to dance across all four walls of the cramped space, and then Marcus pushes the curtain aside and Jean’s first client walks in. He’s a stout man with a wiry face and thin-framed glasses, and he sets himself carefully in the chair across from Jean. 

"I want you to tell me my future," the man says, setting one upward turned palm on the table. When the curtain falls shut, the only remaining light is from the candle, casting long shadows across the man’s face.

Before long, his eyes glass over, unfocused and unseeing, but this is how all Jean’s clients act. They tense up when the curtains shut, as though they’ve been rendered sightless. Jean always keeps the candle burning to provide what little light he needs to see, but his clients act blind, bumping into things and tripping over themselves and reaching towards the dark corners of the room as though they can’t see Jean at all. Sometimes they shiver, or faint, or babble incoherently. 

To an outsider, it might look like magic, but to Jean, it’s all an effect of the Starlight - the glasses of bubbling, golden liquid that are passed freely among the guests. It’s Monsieur R’s signature concoction of distilled spirits and sugar mixed with a powdery yellow substance that he claims is _proprietary_ and _non-addictive_ but has men coming back week after week for more. Jean tried it once, and it left him light-headed and fuzzy for hours afterwards, as if someone had scrambled his brains and erased his memories. 

Tonight, a glass of Starlight is balanced in his client’s free hand, already drained to the final sip. Jean removes it effortlessly and sets it on the floor. Jean is sure the man won’t remember to pick it up when he leaves, but one of the girls will be sure to provide him with a fresh glass as soon as he’s back in the main rooms. 

Jean takes a deep breath. “You want to know your future,” he says. “That’s not very specific.”

Jean keeps his own palms flat on the table, watching the man in the dim candlelight. He always tries to delay the inevitable, because touching his clients makes him feel disgusting. Holding someone’s hand didn’t seem so bad when he first started, but he’s grown to hate it after being forced to do this for the past three years. His nightmares are centered around hands: slim-fingered, chubby-palmed, cold or sweaty or dry or sticky or warm. He feels hands on his neck, on his face, on his arms. He feels fingers clamping around his wrist and his throat. The only touch he knows is punishing and painful and violent. 

His worst nightmares are the ones where his father ruffles his hair or his mother draws him into a hug. Even if it’s his parents, it feels violating. He wakes up with a sick taste in his throat, realizing that even if he leaves this house, even if he gets away and finds his family, he will not be able to tolerate being treated with such care and kindness. It makes him sick because he’s desperate for it. It makes him sick because he doesn’t deserve to be treated kindly. He doesn’t want to ache for this, but he does, and that makes it worse.

Jean is pulled out of his thoughts when the man starts to reach towards him. He takes a steadying breath, trying to convince himself that it isn’t so bad. When that doesn’t work, when Jean feels the sting of irritated tears prickling the backs of his eyes, he reaches out and takes the man's right hand in his own, It’s better to get this over sooner rather than later. 

He makes the symbol of the cross on the man’s palm. Then Jean stares at it: the creases and cracks and calluses and dry skin. He runs his thumb across the man's lifeline - that's what Kevin calls it, anyway. Jean doesn't need to know the difference between a love line and a lifeline because they're all meaningless. This entire spectacle is built on lies and gullible, drugged-up customers. But Kevin has made sure Jean knows each one by name. _For your own sake,_ Kevin told Jean. _In case someone asks. In case they question you. In case they doubt._

Sometimes when Kevin tells him things, Jean almost believes that Kevin cares. His face grows serious and his voice lowers into a quick, dark cadence. He speaks as though Jean is about to disappear, and Jean forgets that Kevin was the first one to beat him, that Kevin was the first one to burn him and stand by while Monsieur R glared at Jean from across the room.

Sometimes, Jean forgets that Kevin was the one to bring him antiseptic and bandages, that Kevin was the one to wrap Jean’s sprained ankle and sneak him ice from the kitchen. He forgets that Kevin cried silent tears after Monsieur R left and Jean was left slumped on the floor, bleeding and broken. He forgets that Kevin knelt in front of him and whispered, _I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, you don’t understand._

Kevin was right about that. Jean doesn’t understand. Not now, not then.

“You’re supposed to be the psychic,” the man says impatiently. “I shouldn’t have to tell you what I came here for. I _paid_ for this.” 

His palm is sweaty, and Jean hates the way it feels against his fingers. He doesn’t say anything for a few minutes. This is all an act, part of a show that the rich elite of New Orleans pay a high price to engage with, and he’s going to play his part. Slowly, he tightens his grip on the man’s palm, and he can feel the pulse of an anxious heartbeat underneath his fingertips.

Every week, Jean repeats this process. He lets men demand things as they hold out their hands over a flickering candle: _tell me my future, tell me when I’ll die, tell me if I’ll be successful, tell me if my wife is going to leave me, tell me if my business is going to fall apart._ It’s strangely vulnerable to have all of their insecurities laid bare. That part of the reading is real: the emotion, the pain, the fear. 

But the candles, the gloves, the long sleeves - they’re part of an elaborate act of a cursed boy who can see your very future through touch alone. _Dangerous_ , Monsieur R advertises. _Inhuman. Damned. Demonic,_ Monsieur R whispers in their ears. _Profitable,_ Jean thinks bitterly.

Although Monsieur R never tells Jean the exact amount he charges for Jean’s ‘palm-reading’, Jean knows they cost at least enough to keep Jean clothed and fed and housed in relative comfort. ( _Comfort_ extending only as far as basic necessities, excluding all beatings and threats and psychological torture and the occasional knife against his skin).

The first time Jean was forced to do a reading, he didn't know what to do. He'd been shoved into the dark room alone, and a man had stumbled in half-drunk with pupils blown wide, the size of dimes. He shoved his palm at Jean and said _when will I die?_

Marcus was standing outside the door. Monsieur R was sitting, presumably, a few feet away in the sitting room. Before the evening had begun, Monsieur R had explained the stakes.

_You will tell them their futures, or your mother will die._

At the time, Jean had only been at the Rising Sun for a month. He hadn't heard from his mother since she was shoved into the back of Monsieur R’s car and driven away. But he held onto hope that both of his parents were alive and well, working hard to pay whatever debt his father owed Monsieur R. So Jean did what Monsieur R asked, if only to protect them. That first night, he held the man's sticky palm in his own and traced a cross onto it. The motion was jerky and unpracticed, but it felt right. His mother used to trace the symbol of the cross onto Jean’s forehead after evening prayers, dragging her thumb in two small strokes against his skin while his eyes were shut. 

_Bless my son and keep him safe,_ she’d say. 

Since then, every reading Jean does starts and ends with a cross. It reminds him why he does this, and who he does it for. It makes the lies he tells more palatable. 

When Jean stays quiet, the man in front of him, the thin wiry one, says, “You need specifics? Fine,” he pauses, “I want to know when my wife will die.”

Jean can't tell if it's bitterness or fear that creeps into the man's voice when he speaks, so he squints at the man’s palm, pretending to look for something. He's learned over time that he’s good at this guessing game. 

There are two elements required to convince his clients the act is real. The first is deduction: the ability to figure out what his clients want to hear without having them say it outright. The second is deception: lies told convincingly enough for his clients to imbue meaning, but not specific enough to be caught in. 

There are really only two possible avenues for this reading. The man either wants his wife dead already, or he's afraid his wife will die too soon. Hatred and pain are often two sides of the same coin - Jean knows from experience - and it’s sometimes difficult to tease out. Not tonight. 

"Your love line," Jean says, tracing a line on the man's palm. "Most people want to know of their own deaths. You know you only get one question, _oui?"_

"I don't care about myself," the man says with a huff, pulling his hand back. Pain flickers across his face and his jaw tightens as he stares into his lap and quietly adds, "Just tell me she’ll be okay." 

_So that's it_ , Jean thinks. The wife is already dying. If this was real, if Jean believed in hope, he'd tell the man what he wanted to hear: your wife will live another thirty healthy years. 

But Jean isn't in the business of hope, and lies will only hurt the man in front of him, whose hands elicit sympathy: calloused, worn, sun-spotted, as if he has spent most of his life outside. He’s not like most of the clients here: rich, bored, and looking for something or someone to capture their whimsy. His clothes have clearly been washed a few too many times, threadbare from cheap detergent and hard water. Yet he’s paid God-knows how much money to ask Jean when his wife is going to die. Jean isn’t yet a monster, so he takes pity on the man in the only way he knows how. He doesn’t lie this time. He doesn’t say she’s got a year or a month or a week. He tells the truth, and prays that it’s enough to satisfy the man. 

"If I were you, I would not waste any more time _here_ ,” the word comes out bitterly, Jean’s hatred for the Rising Sun bubbling to the surface uncontrollably as he holds the man’s hand tightly in his own. “I would go home to her before it’s too late, and I’d tell her I love her. If I told you she had only a week or a month or a year - does it really matter? It will never be enough. You’ll always wish you had just one more minute, one more hour, one more day. So don’t waste what little time you have left chasing after tricks and lies. Go to her. _Now._ "

Jean’s voice is almost urgent by the end. The man's face is pale in the candlelight, and Jean makes a quick cross on the man's palm and lets go of his hand. 

"Don't come here again," Jean adds. It's a dangerous thing to say, because he’s already taking a gamble by not telling the man a direct answer to his question. The man could easily complain to Monsieur R - this could cost Jean a black eye or worse - but he’s willing to take that chance. He’s used to the pain by now. 

For a moment, neither of them move. Then, when Jean is just about to question whether he made the wrong decision, the man nods once, twice. He slips out through the curtains.

Jean can hear the man’s footsteps echoing through the house. It’s impossible, since the music is loud and the voices are louder, but he _swears_ that he can hear the man stumble down the steps of the front veranda. Maybe he just pretends that he can hear it, but really it's all the same at the Rising Sun. Play pretend long enough and it starts to feel like it's the truth.

\-----

The House of the Rising Sun is a terrible place.

If his father hadn't disappeared here three years ago, Jeremy might've called it a pretty house, because objectively, it is. It's got a row of white plantation-style columns across the front, a veranda that stretches all the way around to the back of the house, and a lawn that's perfectly manicured. 

But it's the magnolia trees that really make the Rising Sun _beautiful_. They're a perfect shade of muddy-pink despite it still being early in spring. Too early for them to blossom, but they’re almost in full bloom. Which is a bad thing, because if they blossom now, they'll flower before the last spring frost, and the petals will wither and die. 

Lottie’s been insistent about the frost returning; she might be a kid, but she’s smart. For the past week she’s told him every morning: _It might be eighty degrees out right now, but in two weeks, it's going to freeze. One last cold snap._

Now that it’s currently almost midnight and Jeremy's shirt is sticking to his back, he wonders if she has her weather mixed up. It’s so far from freezing that Jeremy finds the idea of a spring freeze laughable, but he tolerates Lottie’s predictions because she’s twelve and she obsessively reads the Farmer’s Almanac and it’s better than the alternative.

The alternative being an obsession with things more sinister than weather and seasonal agricultural patterns. Things like dark magic and how a man can disappear without a trace. _Hyper-focused,_ Jeremy’s father used to call it. _You’re hyper-focused, not obsessed. You just don’t have the good sense to let go of the wolf when you have it by the ears. It’s not a bad thing._

Jeremy would always tell him that didn’t make sense, because if you had a wolf by the ears and you let go, it would bite you. Patrick Knox was the kind of father to laugh and say _, one day you’ll understand what I mean, Jerry. When you’re older._

If Patrick Knox wasn’t missing, Jeremy would let himself feel angry at how belittling that was. But Patrick Knox had been missing for almost three years and Jeremy isn’t hyper-focused. He’s obsessed with finding him. He can find time to be angry later, once his father is back safely at home. 

He wipes his sweaty palms on his pants nervously. Tonight is for answers. He’s so close he can taste it. This time when he leaves the House of the Rising Sun, he’s going to have answers. Still: the nerves are making his gut churn. There’s only two possibilities when it comes down to what happened to Patrick Knox. Obviously there are a million possibilities tied up in the details of whatever happened that fateful night of March 21st, but they fall under two headings: one, Patrick Knox is dead. Two, he is alive. 

Jeremy can’t save his father if he’s dead already. But if there’s a chance he’s still alive, that Patrick Knox has been living somewhere else for three years without contacting Jeremy or his mom once … Jeremy doesn’t know what he’ll do. 

So he doesn’t think about it. He'll keep looking for his father, of course. Won't he? Isn't that what he's been doing all this time? Aside from cooking for the twins and taking Lottie to school and signing permission slips for field trips to the science museum in Baton Rouge and working doubles at DeVine's because his mom can barely get out of bed most days. Aside from riding his bike to get groceries. Aside from ending up knee-deep in the swamp every night to pull the kids out of the weeds in time for dinner. Between all of that, after he's caught a few hours of sleep if Rebecca doesn't wet the bed, _then_ he looks for his father.

There's not a lot of time left for looking, if he's being honest. It’s why it’s taken him three years to get to this point of finally buying entry into the Rising Sun.

Lottie tells him to stop or he'll end up like their dad (missing), or their mom (also missing, but in a very different way). What she means to say, he thinks, is that she doesn't want to lose him, too. Which is stupid, because he won't get lost at the Rising Sun tonight.

It's five past midnight, and he's been stalling, staring at the early-blooming magnolias and the rising moon in the sky, fiddling with the silvery-black coin in his pocket and kicking at the sidewalk until the toe of his boot is scuffed. 

_Now or never, Knox._

He pulls the invitation out of his pocket and walks up the front steps with as much confidence as he can muster, shoulders back, chin up, eyes forward. He drops the invitation - a single magical black coin - into the waiting hand of a man standing at the front door, which is painted an elegant shade of green.

The man turns over the black coin, holding it so it glows almost silver-white in the light of the moon. It's a small trick, an affordable piece of magic. The coin flickers brightly in his fingers as the man snaps once, and then it's gone. Disappeared into thin air - but that part isn't magic. That’s just sleight of hand. (Probably, Jeremy thinks. Tonight, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.)

"Welcome to the Rising Sun," the man says, and the door swings open. 

For all the Southern charm outside, the interior is the opposite: black and red and polished mahogany and bronze trim everywhere, mixed in with silk and velvet and leather and lace. Jeremy stands frozen in the entry. A girl dressed in black stops in front of him with a tray balanced in one hand. It’s filled with tall silver champagne flutes that smell sickly sweet. 

"Starlight?" She says, tipping the tray towards Jeremy. The liquid in the glasses shimmers, iridescent, and Jeremy is captivated by it for a few seconds.

_Focus._

He shakes his head no before he accidentally says yes, and the girl disappears back into the crowd. Most of the guests are men, he notes as he works his way into the crowd. Away from the door, he's hit with the pine-y smell of expensive aftershave, the stuffy smell of sweat from bodies pressed to close together, and strong liquor. No matter where he goes, the house smells of the sweet drink the girl had offered him - the Starlight - and the men packed into the entryway are equal parts drunk and high and probably barely registering the whisper of fabric against their skin as Jeremy tries to push his way past them.

There’s nothing left to do but wait. His directions from Alvarez had been: dress nicely but keep a low profile, don't talk to anyone, and wait for Kevin to approach you _._ The only problem is he’s never met Kevin, and he doesn’t know how Kevin will recognize him.

Nerves keep him pressed to the sides of the sitting room for a while, but time seems insubstantial here. He blinks twice and an empty champagne flute appears in his hands. He sniffs it, and he’s pretty sure it is Starlight. Or it used to be, at least. Beneath him, the floor tilts, and he stumbles towards the grand staircase in the foyer, tripping over his feet and apologizing as he knocks into elbows and spills other people’s drinks. Somewhere along the way, his glass slips from his fingers but he never hears it shatter.

He stops dead in his tracks when he sees a man sitting on the banister at the top of the stairs, glowering down at him. He’s barely Jeremy’s age, and for a moment Jeremy is convinced this is Kevin. 

Someone in the crowd shouts up at the man. 

“Darling, come down and dance with us. Just for the night,” the disembodied voice calls. The man on the banister sets his gaze on a group of men by the door who wear wolfish grins, but then he slips down from the banister and falls into the crowd below.

 _Falls_ might not be the best word. He drops, but at that moment Jeremy leans into a potted plant and vomits, so he doesn’t see the landing. He assumes it happens, especially once a hand rests on his shoulder and pulls him upright.

For a moment, Jeremy panics. _What if it’s not Kevin? What if I’m getting kicked out for puking in the decor?_

Alvarez had reassured him with only mild condescension: _oh honey, he'll know it’s you right away._

"What can I help you with?" A deep voice purrs at his shoulder, and a warm hand slips against the small of his back. Jeremy is barely able to keep from shuddering at the touch, at the way the man slipped through the crowd like a lynx. One second he was across the room, dangling from the banister, and the next his head is bent low to Jeremy’s ear and -

_Just tell him the passphrase._

"I'm looking for an old friend," Jeremy says. He's repeated the line a hundred times in the mirror already, and he hopes it's a convincing act. The words blend together, courtesy of the Starlight, and they don’t sound right to his ears. He starts again. “I’m - here for, I’m looking - it’s an old friend -”

"An old friend?" The man says, his fingers tapping a staccato rhythm into Jeremy’s lower back. Between the man’s hand and the dim lights, the smell of smoke, the sickly sweet Starlight, the sweat, the bodies, the aftershave, Jeremy can barely think straight. 

_It's magic._

This whole house is magic, and he's already drunk on it, with or without the Starlight. For a sobering moment, he realizes he doesn’t know how much Starlight he’s had. One glass? Two? More? It takes everything he has to pull out the second token - this one hard-won from almost a hundred hours of helping Madame DeVine scrape gum off of the undersides of tables at the diner - but the man's eyes flash black when he sees it. 

"What a peculiar thing for an innocent boy like you to bring into my house," he says, taking the tiny leather satchel from his fingers. It's barely as big as Jeremy’s thumb, but the man hefts its weight as though it's lead. "How did you come across this?"

_That wasn't one of the questions._

_... Or was it?_

He can't remember what he'd practiced in the mirror, not when the man’s fingers have slipped under Jeremy’s shirt and are pressing into the skin of his back. Panic returns. The crowd seems thinner somehow - has it been long? How long _has_ it been? A glance over his shoulder shows the horizon is still dark, but it's predawn blue instead of midnight black - the kind of dim light that makes the world shimmer, iridescent and surreal.

"A friend," Jeremy says, almost reaching out to take the satchel back. Maybe this isn’t Kevin, maybe Alvarez was wrong and this is a mistake. Maybe there are no answers to be had at the House of the Rising Sun.

"Yes, a friend," the man repeats, and when Jeremy blinks again, he realizes they're standing in front of a black curtain. Suddenly, the windows he was looking out of are behind them. His shirt feels sweaty, too heavy against his skin, and he realizes the tiny satchel has been tucked into his shirt pocket. The man’s hand skirts across the necklace around Jeremy’s throat, resting against the metal briefly. “You’ll want to keep this close.”

The light has shifted again, and it's darker near the curtain. Colder, too. He can't help but think this is what March _should_ feel like as his skin chills. 

"You're in over your head," the man hisses in his ear, and he shoves Jeremy roughly through the curtained doorway without warning.

Alvarez told him to expect the Rising Sun to overwhelm him.

_The House will try to entice you in every way. It will promise you things. It will whisper in your ear and offer you exactly what your heart desires, so stay focused. Think of only the one thing you want to know, and if you're lucky, the House will answer you._

He didn't expect it to occupy all of his senses. _Overwhelm_ could have meant a multitude of things, but he'd never experienced a feeling quite like this.

The room behind the curtain is pitch black. Endlessly so. 

For a few seconds, he breathes in and out, trying to wash the heaviness out of his limbs before he does something reckless. But he can't see, and the room seems to get darker each second that he stands there. The walls are growing closer around him.

There's a soft touch on his arm, fingers trailing down to his wrist. Jeremy jumps at the contact, backing towards where the curtain should be, but the hand grips his wrist and wrenches him forward into the heart of the darkness.

"What do you want?" A voice growls dangerously close to his ears. Breath skirts across his neck, and Jeremy shivers.

_Focus._

He can’t see anything at all, and it’s a terrifying feeling. The darkness is unnatural, just like the early-blooming magnolias out front. The urge to run overtakes him briefly, and he wants to pull away. With barely contained fear, he grinds his teeth and commands his body to stay put. He can't afford to repeat this. It took months of saving to afford the invitation, and Alvarez had to wait until late January to gather the final ingredients for the satchel that's burning a hole in his pocket. After tonight, there is no returning to the House of the Rising Sun. 

This isn’t how he expected the evening to unfold, but now that he’s here, he doesn’t have much of a choice but to put his trust in the hands of a stranger. 

Jeremy grasps at the words, finding them closer than he’d expected this time. 

"I need to know what happened to my father three years ago."

\-----

It's a silly question. It's not even a question, technically, but Jean doesn't say that. Not to a client. It would be rude _._

"I can't tell you that," he says instead, already grasping at excuses. It's late; he's tired, he’s already seen half a dozen clients and wants nothing more than to fall into his own bed and sleep the entire day away. His watch glints in the candlelight; it’s half past five. Monsieur R usually shuts down these parties around six AM, so he doesn’t have much more to endure. 

"Please," the boy says, and his voice trembles when he speaks, like this was his last hope. Jean reflexively leans back, as though the boy’s fear is catching, but he doesn’t let go of his hand yet.

 _There's no magic here,_ Jean wants to say. _It's all a carefully curated lie that you've bought into. Don't trust Sara. Don’t trust_ **_me._**

Instead, he says, “It doesn’t work that way. Didn’t anyone explain this to you beforehand? You’re supposed to ask about your future. I can’t help you with the past.” It comes out more harshly than is entirely necessary, because it’s a lie and it tastes bitter on his tongue and he ran out of patience for this game three clients ago. 

“But -”

What Jean wants to say is, _I can’t tell you anything. Not your future, not your past. You wasted your money coming here._ He can’t say that, either, because the boy’s eyes are wide and bloodshot, clearly high on Starlight. 

“There are no refunds,” Jean says, and the panic in the boy’s eyes makes Jean’s palms sweat. He doesn’t have time to care about whatever problems this boy has dragged behind him into the Rising Sun. The guilt of inevitably letting this boy down is uncomfortable, and Jean wriggles beneath it. He tries a different approach: “Whatever happened to your father three years ago isn’t worth whatever you paid to get in here. The sooner you accept that, the better off you will be.” 

_You’re naive,_ he wants to say to the boy, fighting back the urge to lean closer to him in order to snarl at him to scare him away. He wants to terrify this kid into never coming back. Something about the way the boy’s golden curls flash in the candlelight as he looks up at Jean with a broken expression makes Jean furious. 

Jean knows the world is cruel, but he’s gotten used to the scars and the nightmares. The boy in front of him clearly hasn’t learned what real danger is. When Jean looks at him, all he can see is another version of himself, younger and hopeful and desperate for answers. A version of himself that was willing to agree with Monsieur R, to do anything within his power to make the pain go away. 

He sees himself, briefly, in the boy’s eyes, and he almost spits out the words that rise in his throat. _You’re stupid for coming here, and stupid for wasting your money to have a conversation with a fraud. I can’t give you the answers you’re looking for. Why can’t you see that? Get out. Get. Out._

But Jean stops himself and takes a deep breath before he does something stupid. He really looks at the boy in front of him, and slowly, he realizes this boy isn’t the same as Jean. His face is young and freckles are generously dotted across his cheeks, and when Jean leans closer, he sees a flickering shadow of exhaustion under the boy’s eyes. His clients are rarely under 30, and it’s strange for Jean to see someone his own age at the Rising Sun. Whatever has driven this boy to Jean’s room has been borne of desperation and sadness, although the Starlight is doing a hell of a good job hiding it. Jean doesn’t have to be a psychic or a palm reader to recognize pain when he goes looking for it. 

Jean wishes he had some form of kindness to offer this boy, but it’s been years since he’s been gentle with anyone, himself included. There is no comfort at the Rising Sun, so he does his best with what he has, stumbling over his words. 

“You could ask me something - something else instead,” Jean says quietly, uncharacteristically. He tries not to think about why he’s extending this offering. “Some people … they just want to know if they’ll be famous or rich or successful. I could tell you that.”

“I won’t be any of those things,” the boy says with the kind of certainty that only real psychics should have. “I don’t _care_ about those things. I only want to know what happened to my father.”

The eager glint in the boy’s eyes tells Jean that whatever he says tonight will be taken as truth. Out of frustration, Jean humors him. 

“Let’s say I _could_ help you with your father. Why come here to ask about him, three years later? Why the Rising Sun? Why me?” Jean asks. The last question is barely a whisper, and he’s ashamed at the way his face burns hot as soon as the words are out of his mouth. Nestled within that question - _why me_ \- is a fragile vulnerability that Jean doesn’t even show to Kevin. Here, in this tiny, dark room, he can’t help but watch the candlelight dance across the boy’s carefully guarded face and wonder if that could’ve been him, in a different life. _Why me_ _indeed_ , Jean thinks.

“The last time I saw him alive was here, on March first, three years ago. I would’ve come sooner, but ... I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t want answers at first. I was so sure he’d show up on his own. I mean, he never did, obviously, but I was convinced that he would. And if I actually went looking for him and it turned out he was dead ... what would I have told my sisters? My brother? They’re too young to know what death is _._ How would I have told them? ... So it’s been three years. But I want - I’m ready now. I can’t _not_ know anymore. It’s slowly driving me insane, and Alvarez said _La Ma_ _lchance_ could help me find the answers I’m looking for.” 

The name is like a slap to the face. 

_La Malchance._

That’s who he is, after all. That’s what he’s called. Within these walls, Jean Moreau doesn’t exist. But hearing this boy say that name makes him flinch. 

This is who he is: _L_ _a Malchance._

Bad luck. 

Jean learned a long time ago that life isn’t fair. It wasn’t fair when Monsieur R held a gun to his head for the first time. It wasn’t fair when Marcus held a knife to Jean’s throat. It wasn’t fair when Monsieur R had men beat him into submission and leave him with broken ribs, broken fingers, a broken nose. It wasn’t fair when Jean’s father disappeared or when his mother was dragged into the back of that Cadillac. But this - listening to a boy his own age struggle with some of the same questions and doubts and fears that Jean had been struggling with for the past three years - it isn’t fair _._ The universe couldn’t dump a boy with golden curls and dark eyes and freckles and soft lines around his frowning eyes into Jean’s lap and say _look at him. He’s been through what you’ve been through. His ache is a mirror-image bruise of your own, a copy. He isn’t Kevin. He isn’t Monsieur R._

The boy is breaking. 

No. _Jean_ is breaking. 

The universe can’t do this - not the universe, actually. Sara Alvarez did this. Kevin Day did this. Monsieur R did this. Jean’s father and Jeremy’s father and every gambling man did this. Everyone who paid to have Jean tell their fortune did this.

Jean did this. He hates himself for staying, for letting Monsieur R keep him locked up in this house like an animal. He hates being powerless.

“That’s not my name,” is all Jean can say after a long pause. He’s not _L_ _a Malchance -_ not tonight, not to this boy. He offers the only truth he’s given freely in this dark room: his name. “I’m Jean. Moreau.”

“Jeremy Knox,” the boy says, a soft, hopeful smile spreading across his face. “So, Jean, can you help me?” 

Jean wants to say no (badly), but he can’t, not when Jeremy says _Jean_ like it’s a promise, like it’s a gift. Not when, for the first time in years, he doesn’t feel like _La_ _Malchance._

Jean supposes his name is already a promise, but Jeremy would have no way of knowing how few people knew Jean’s name, how few people knew Jean even existed, how few people cared about him. Realistically, he could count them on one hand: Kevin, his parents (assuming they were coming back for him still), Alvarez, Laila. On a good day, he could count Madame DeVine amongst them, too. 

Five or six people. That’s how many people would notice if Jean disappeared one day. Like his father. Like his mother. Like Jeremy’s father. 

But on a bad day, he has to swallow back the feeling that no one would look for him if he disappeared. At the very least, he knew that Kevin certainly wouldn’t, but it’s not like Jean would go looking for Kevin if the tables were turned. Fair enough. 

“I can’t promise anything,” Jean says. _Pathetique,_ he thinks to himself.

Jeremy hesitates, and his eyes remain blindly unfocused as he leans forward over the candle towards Jean. Their hands are still linked, and Jean can feel Jeremy’s fingers shaking. With practiced ease, Jean flips Jeremy’s hand over, tracing the sign of the cross against Jeremy’s thin wrist before pressing his thumbs into the soft part of his hand, where his thumb creases against his palm. 

"Start again,” Jean says. “Tell me what you remember from that night."

Jeremy takes a deep, steadying breath before he starts, and Jean tries to focus on the place where their hands connect as he traces Jeremy’s lifeline. It’s short, cut off too soon by his love line, but that means nothing. Palm reading isn’t _real._

"My father - Patrick Knox - asked me to drive him here, and told me to wait in the car just down the street. Twenty-five minutes exactly, he said. He made me promise that if he didn’t come out, I would leave and forget everything I’d seen, but I couldn’t leave. I waited for hours, and he never came.” Jeremy takes a deep breath, and his hands aren’t shaking anymore. He’s relaxed into Jean’s touch. _An effect of the Starlight,_ Jean tells himself. “I just want to know what happened when he went inside the Rising Sun, and why he never came out after.”

"Don't pin your hopes on me,” Jean says, which is the closest he can get to the truth right now. Jean's thumb is still nestled into the center of the boy's palm, and it’s damp with sweat. _Because it’s eighty degrees out,_ Jean tells himself.

“Will I ever see him again?” Jeremy asks. His voice is as raw as Jean’s was when he asked, _why me?_

For a moment, they sit in silence. Jean is glad that the Starlight has made Jeremy blind to whatever is happening in the room, because he’s sure that his own face is a wreck. He doesn’t know what to say, and he’s about to admit this was a mistake when he realizes he can still treat this like a reading. He clings to familiarity in the face of whatever buzzing emotion is crawling beneath his skin, distracting him. 

There are two parts to reading Jeremy, as with every client.

Part one: the deduction. He already knows what Jeremy wants. It’s what Jean wants, what Kevin wants, what everyone who’s lost a parent wants. They all just want to know what happened. Although it sounds like a small ask, it’s an impossible one. Jean doesn’t know what happened to Jeremy’s father, but he wonders if he couldn’t find out. Monsieur R is gone more often than not, and Jean could slip into his office undetected one day. He could look through files. It’s a longshot, but it’s worth a try. 

Part two: the deception. This is the part that makes Jean queasy. He doesn’t want to lie to Jeremy. He knows the pain of not knowing, of hoping for the best and fearing for the worst. He knows the toll it takes over the years. Mentally, physically, emotionally. If he finds out what happened to Jeremy’s father, he can’t water down the truth to make it more palatable. He knows he’ll have to tell him whatever it is. And he also knows if he can’t find the truth, he won’t be able to lie. He can’t make something up like he does for the rest of his clients.

“I won’t give you a reading tonight,” Jean says, even though that’s exactly what he’s already doing. As expected, Jeremy’s face falls. Jean lets the disappointment sink in for a few moments before he adds, “But that doesn’t mean I won’t help you later. Give me a week, and we’ll meet again.” 

Jean can feel Jeremy’s rabbit-fast pulse beneath his thumb, where it presses into his palm, and he digs in deeper, feeling the pull of truth and blood and every terrible vision he's had since stepping foot through the door of the Rising Sun. He's not a fortune teller (he's not _anything_ ), but he's still alive and human enough that he recognizes the strange twist of tension in the room as Jeremy’s breathing hitches.

For a split second, he sees Jeremy standing in the arched doorway of the sitting room as flames trail up towards the ceiling. The smoke is heavy enough that Jean can’t breathe, and he hears someone shouting _Jeremy!_ in the distance. The boy’s mouth opens, and Jean’s name falls out as the flames draw near. 

_It’s not real_ , he tells himself. _It’s just a waking nightmare._ _An imagined terror, a sick fascination._ _It’s nothing._

Immediately, Jean lets go of Jeremy’s hand, and he’s back in the tiny room with the candle. No flames, no smoke. 

It’s Sara’s sachet, Jean realizes. He can smell it. He’s slow for not realizing Jeremy had one on him before. Now that he knows it’s in the room, it’s making his head spin. 

_There was no sachet when you saw the flames in the foyer,_ a small voice says in Jean’s head. He pushes it aside quickly.

“Where is it?” He asks roughly, fighting against the pain at the back of his head.

“Where is what?” Jeremy asks, confused.

“The herbs. The thing Sara gave you.”

Jeremy’s hand flutters to his shirt pocket and fumbles as he pulls out the sachet. Whatever Sara puts in them always makes Jean feel sick. It's probably some kind of poisonous swamp root, or animal feces, or snake venom. It's probably making Jeremy just as delirious, too. He reaches out to take it, but when he looks at his own fingers, they’re blackened with soot and ash. 

Jeremy sways in his seat, and Jean nudges the candle just a little bit closer to him. The light reflects in Jeremy’s eyes, which might be dark green, might be dark brown. It's hard to tell in the dark.

"What’s going on?" Jeremy asks.

 _I don’t know,_ Jean thinks, but he doesn't say it. After a moment, Jeremy’s shoulders slump forward and he passes out. Jean has to snatch the candle back to keep him from falling into it. There’s a distinctive thump as his limp body drops to the table, and Marcus hears it.

“Everything okay in there, John?” He asks from outside the curtain. 

“It’s fine,” Jean says quickly, grimacing at the mispronunciation of his name. “I’ll be done in a few more minutes.”

Marcus grunts in acknowledgement, and Jean hazards a gentle tap against Jeremy’s forehead a few times.

“Hey,” he whispers. “Jeremy. Wake up.”

Jeremy, however, remains motionless on the table, his head lolling to the side. Jean takes the vile sachet between two fingers - he’s always hated those things, unnecessarily potent - and drops it into the candle flame. 

Sara is always telling Kevin _this is old magic - magic that belongs to the Earth, not men. It’s dangerous._ But he’s seen her make them, and Jean knows it’s only a thimbleful of clary sage and rosemary and some dried grasses from the bayou that smell like what he imagined the color green would smell of. There’s nothing magic about a few plants, but they smell, especially in this tiny room, especially when combined with the scent of the burning candle. 

This isn’t the first time one of Sara’s sachets has incapacitated a client. The flame grows brighter as it burns the sachet, letting out a shower of tiny sparks. For a few moments, the room smells like burning rubber and bitter spice. Jean's stomach revolts, but he manages not to gag. He holds his breath, but the feeling of nausea clamps down on his stomach like a vice all the same. After a few moments, the flame burns itself out into darkness and then nothing is left. No smell, no sachet, no light. The nausea slowly rolls back over the next few minutes. Jean can taste its retreat with sweet relief, and his entire body begins to relax. It only takes a short while after that for Jeremy to respond to Jean’s hushed requests: _wake up, wake up, wake up._

Without the light of the candle, the room is pitch black, but Jean’s spent so many hours here that he could map the entirety of the space from memory. He can feel the shift in the air when Jeremy draws in his first conscious breath, the movement as he lifts his heavy head off of the table and tries to stand. 

"Maggie?" He says. Jean gropes for the boy's hand in the dark and finds it almost immediately. He wraps it in his own.

"Not Maggie,” Jean says. “You're at the Rising Sun, and you need to go home." Jean squeezes Jeremy’s hand, forgetting to make the sign of the cross as he lets go. "Now. "

Jeremy stumbles when he gets up, but manages to push the curtain aside. The grey light from the sitting room washes over his silhouette as he pauses in the doorway. 

Jean could still forget about Jeremy’s sad eyes and missing father. A quick shower, a hot cup of tea, a splash of absinthe - it could erase all of this from Jean’s mind. Jeremy isn't his problem. Jeremy’s father isn't his problem. 

But Jean knows what it's like to miss someone so desperately that you'll do anything, believe in anything, to get them back. He knows what it's like to cling to any information - no matter how incomplete or flawed or untrustworthy - and pray that it's real. He knows what it's like to pretend. When Jeremy glances at Jean over his shoulder one last time, Jean sees a familiar mask fall into place on his face, a crooked smile. Soft. Trembling. One he's worn himself far too often over the past few years.

"Wait," Jean says, pulling the curtain back into place so Marcus can't hear them. He : "I can't promise anything, but ... meet me next Saturday on the back lawn at 5 AM. Come alone."

Jean doesn’t have time to remember what day it is today, or count out what day Saturday is going to be. Ho only picks Saturday because it’s the day that Monsieur R spends at the Clairebonne most weekends, so it’s the safest morning to sneak out unnoticed. 

He pushes aside the curtain and watches as Jeremy leaves, wondering if this is a regular bad idea, or a worse one. 

He gets the feeling it’s a worse one.

\-----

When Jeremy stumbles out of the Rising Sun, onto the wide-sweeping veranda, it's already dawn. He hadn't planned on his foray into the Rising Sun to last all night, but somehow the time has passed in barely the blink of an eye. His mouth is dry, his tongue tastes like old pennies, and his vision blurs as he tries to remember what the clairvoyant told him. 

_Next Saturday. 5 AM. Back lawn. Alone._

He repeats the words like a mantra, memorizing each one. As he walks further from the house, the world starts spinning a little. By the time he finds his bike where he left it, resting against one of the magnolias on the parkway, he's seeing double. He falls once, twice, on the way to Alvarez's, and when he finally stops in front of her building, he simply steps off and the bike falls with a clatter into the gutter.

"What the hell?" She yells from her window on the third floor. 

Jeremy blinks a few times, trying to stop the figures from dancing in front of his eyes. When he opens his eyes again, she's on the street, only a few feet away from him. No, she's a thousand miles away. 

"It's 7 AM - what happened to you?" She asks, her voice too loud for Jeremy's fragile state. 

"I'm good," Jeremy tries to say, but his words come out mangled.

"Get inside," she says with a huff as she drags him in through the back door. It slam shut behind them, and then she's dragging him up the long flight of stairs to the third floor. He feels more than sees his way into her room, his hands groping the walls to keep himself upright as she pushes him towards the couch.

"Sleep," she commands him, and he does.

\-----

It's late when he wakes up, and his head is pounding. His usual to-do list flashes in his mind: make lunches, make breakfast, check that Georgie _actually_ showered the first time he was asked, tell Kathleen to stop drawing in her library book, put food outside for the stray dogs that have been following Lottie around lately. Someone needs to drop the cash envelope for the water bill in the mailbox on Central so it doesn't get shut off again. Someone needs to put Lottie and Maggie and Georgie and Kathleen on the bus, and make sure Anne and Rebecca are safe in his mom's room. 

_Someone_ is always Jeremy, but today, it's not, because he's curled in a ball on Alvarez's couch with what feels like the world's worst hangover.

"Help me," he moans, throwing an arm over his eyes when the room spins a little.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," Alvarez says from somewhere behind him. He doesn't bother trying to open his eyes this time.

"Everything hurts," he whines in a crackly voice.

"Serves you right. I told you not to drink anything there. It's all vomit-inducing."

Jeremy moans again, but sits up and opens his eyes. Alvarez rents a room in Mme DeVine's building, which is better known to the public as _DeVine's Diner -_ pronounced _divine,_ because most people, even in New Orleans, don't realize she's French. DeVine's Diner takes up the entire first floor of the building, and Mme DeVine's rooms are on the second. Alvarez's single bedroom is tucked up in the loft of the third floor, with only enough room for a galley kitchen, plus a bed, table, and couch. It's cramped, but Alvarez has filled every square inch of it with herself: the sprigs of herbs hanging upside-down over the tiny sink, the row of thirteen pennies along the windowsill (all from her birth year), the handful of beach stones piled in the southernmost corner of the room next to the radiator, the faded picture of her mother tacked to the wall in a cheap gold frame, the tiny cross hung above the door.

As much as Jeremy's home is in the bayou with his siblings, it is also here in this room. 

"I have work today," he says, trying to stand. "And someone needs to get the kids to school, I'm going to be late."

"I took care of them already. It's _noon_." 

Jeremy ends up laying back down - the room is still spinning too much, and she's right about it being noon. The clock ticks quietly on the wall behind her, 12:13 PM. 

_Shit._

Alvarez is nothing if not efficient, and it only takes a matter of minutes for her to procure a plate of toast with butter and honey and cinnamon and a cup of some kind herbal tea. Jeremy eats despite the way his stomach protests, and by the time he's done, he doesn't feel half as bad. The floor has started to feel a little more solid beneath his feet, at least, and he doesn’t ask what was in the tea.

"So how’d it go?" Alvarez asks as Jeremy finishes the last of the tea. 

"I don’t think my dad is there.”

That was true - Jean had taken Jeremy's hand in the pitch black room and spoken in a voice that felt like velvet. Jeremy could tell something was scratching at his memory, a little out of place, a little disquieting. Jean had said something else but Jeremy couldn't remember what. 

"Did you keep the charm with you? The entire time?" They both know she's talking about the tiny bag of herbs, which he’d kept safely in his shirt pocket.

"Yes," he says, patting his pocket. It only takes half a second to realize there’s nothing there, and a new wave of nausea washes over him.

_Shit._

"I told you not to lose it," Alvarez says with a frown, her hands pulling nervously at a thread on the hem of her shirt. “Tell me you didn’t lose it before your reading.”

"No - I - I mean, I’m pretty sure I had it. I can't remember when it - I didn't _lose_ it, I just don't remember -"

And then he remembers - not where the herbs are, but something more important: _Saturday, 5 AM, the back lawn_ , _alone._

“Tell me you lost it after,” Alvarez repeats in a dark voice. “ _La Malchance_ is a dangerous man, Jeremy. If you didn’t have that with you, he could’ve fucked you up.”

She stares at him, her gaze searching as if Jean had changed him somehow. 

Before going to the Rising Sun, Jeremy would’ve taken her warnings as truth. But now he has memories of the moment he saw Jean’s face for the first time, at the end of the reading when Jean pulled back the curtain and shoved Jeremy out of the dark room. Jean’s eyes had been a worried shade of grey, his hair pushed back nervously as he ran his hands through it as he told Jeremy to _leave_. 

Jean didn’t seem any more dangerous than Jeremy was. 

That’s when the rest of the night snaps into place, and Jean’s voice hums low in the back of his mind: _Saturday 5 AM back lawn alone_. 

"Nothing bad happened. I'm fine," is all Jeremy can say when Alvarez keeps watching him with disappointment. 

After another moment of silence, she shrugs and nudges his foot with hers. "Don’t worry about it. I can talk to Kevin sometime this week … he'll find it." 

“Thanks,” Jeremy says. 

She nods, knowing exactly what he’s thanking her for. For letting him crash on her couch, for making the herbs in the first place and getting him the invitation, for making him honey toast and taking care of his siblings. The words feel shallow when he says them because he hasn't told her the full truth, but his gratitude is genuine. She would try to stop him if she knew he was going back alone, and he wants to see Jean again. 

Scratch that - he wants to see what Jean can find about Patrick Knox’s disappearance. (And okay, maybe a part of him _does_ want to see Jean again, too, but that’s not something Jeremy has time to think about when Alvarez is scrutinizing his every move).

He and Alvarez have never kept secrets from each other. Not in middle school, when Alvarez had her first crush on their English teacher, Miss Kemp. Not in high school when Jeremy failed algebra. Not after his father disappeared. Not until now, but he justifies the secrecy: now that he’d lost her protective charm, she would try and talk him out of going back to the Rising Sun. He didn’t have the time or energy for that, and a small part of him also didn’t want to share his conversation with Jean - which he only had bits and pieces of to begin with.

"So _La Malchance_ gave you what you wanted?" Alvarez asks, but it’s almost a statement. As if she can see the answer in Jeremy’s eyes.

He knows that Alvarez and Jean have some kind of history, but the specifics still elude him. All he can say for sure is that she believes in Jean’s ability to answer any question with complete accuracy, given the right circumstances. Circumstances that apparently include a small handful of carefully curated plants from the nearby swamps and her own rooftop garden, with a small contribution from Mme DeVine's cache that even Jeremy is not privy to. 

Usually, Jeremy believes in Alvarez. That's why he bothered with seeking out Jean in the first place, and saved every penny for the past six months to afford the luminescent coin - the ticket for entry into the main house. That's why he helped Alvarez search for plants in the bayou in mid-January, ankle-deep in freezing mud while she pulled dormant sprouts from the water until she had what she needed for the protective charm. They had a long history together, and he’s spent the better part of a decade following her into swamps and forests (and even a wealthy politician's garden once) to gather samples of elusive plants for her charms and cures and poultices and potions. For almost a decade, he's listened to her say things like _listen to the earth Jer, can't you hear it?,_ and _when was the last time you really felt the ground beneath your feet?_ , but for the first time he’s questioning her advice. 

He went into the Rising Sun believing that Jean could tell him if his father was dead or alive. He'd walked out confused and disoriented, but with a single offer: _Saturday. 5 AM. Back garden. Alone._

It felt like a promise when Jean’s eyes - dark and cautious and familiar - met Jeremy’s. So even though Jeremy doesn't have an answer about his father yet - not one he can remember, at least - he nods when Alvarez ask him if _La Malchance_ gave him what he wanted.

In a roundabout way, Jean had done exactly that. Because Jeremy is going back to the House of the Rising Sun - this time without an invitation in his pocket, without the protection of Alvarez's plants, without expectation. And Jean is going to help him solve the mystery of his missing father.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for stopping by! I know this fic is slow moving and slow to update, so to anyone who has the patience to stick with this ... I hope it doesn't disappoint!! the next chapter will be ready early/mid-october most likely


	3. Child's Play

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back again with another chapter! Thank you to everyone reading along at home for the kind comments + kudos on the first couple of chapters, this fic is my happy place and I hope you are enjoying it :)
> 
> Warnings/tags: I'm not going to lie, this chapter is a little dark, so read these first for potential subject matter! (also let me point out the new angst+hurt/comfort tag, meaning yes there will not just be pure angst for this entire fic!
> 
> Contains: minor injury/blood, mentions of a jar with bones of questionable origin (human? maybe, maybe not), photos of dead bodies (meant to be a disturbing concept but nothing is described in graphic detail), mentions of PTSD-like symptoms/depression/giving up/losing the will to fight back/etc, mentions of past injuries that Jean has endured, mentions of v*mit, mentions of Kayleigh's death. I swear the next chapter won't be as dark, it has Jeremy's siblings! 
> 
> If you have any questions or concerns before reading, you can always drop a comment down below or you can message me on [tumblr](https://passive-phantom.tumblr.com/ask)!

Jean waits until late Friday afternoon to tell Kevin about his plan with Jeremy - a mere twelve hours before he's supposed to meet the strange boy in the back garden. (As if you could call the jumble of thoughts in his head a plan. It's hardly a plan; it's barely an idea.) 

He knows very little about Jeremy Knox. Belatedly, Jean realizes he should've found out what ties Jeremy’s family has to Monsieur R before he offered to help him. For all Jean knows, Jeremy’s father could be best friends with Monsieur R, alive and well and sitting in the parlor downstairs sipping whiskey neat out of a crystal tumbler. It could be a test set up by Monsieur R to see how loyal Jean is to the Rising Sun. 

Except Jean’s gut tells him that Jeremy isn’t lying. He remembers the look in Jeremy’s eyes right before the candlelight flickered out, the pain and hope and confusion that mixed together. That wasn’t the kind of emotion that could be easily faked. Jean would much rather give Jeremy the benefit of the doubt and face whatever punishment Monsieur R could think of if it turned out to be a setup, rather than refuse to help someone in pain. It’s not like Jean hasn't endured it all at Monsieur R's hand. Frankly, at this point, if Jean was cut open and bled dry, he would probably thank Monsieur R with his dying breath for being put out of his misery. 

But at his core, Jean is still selfish. He isn't doing this entirely out of altruistic self-sacrifice. He's doing this because he wants to spend a few hours outside of this infernal house, and that’s worth more than gold. But the punishment for leaving is steep, so Jean can't justify it without a compelling reason. Now, with Jeremy's potentially missing father on the line, he’s willing to risk it. Jeremy’s problems are realistically just an elaborate excuse to get out of the house, a result of extensive mental gymnastics that Jean uses to allow himself this break in monotony.

That's what he tells himself, at least.

The problem is he can't get out alone. In the past, it's taken careful planning and coordination between him and Kevin to steal a few hours alone in the Lilac District, rarely venturing further into the heart of New Orleans. If he was being smart about this, he would've brought this up with Kevin days ago, as soon as he decided to help Jeremy.

But what's done is done, and Jean is supposed to meet Jeremy in the back garden in a matter of hours despite having done absolutely nothing to facilitate a successful escape.

He also hasn’t searched for any information on Jeremy’s father, which means that even if he gets out of the house sans detection, he won’t have anything useful to offer Jeremy. A waste of a trip, in other words. 

And _if_ he had been serious about this from the start, he would've asked Jeremy more questions, like _what did your father do before he disappeared?,_ or _what happened on the night your father disappeared?,_ or _did your father have a drinking problem or massive amounts of debt or a secret second family?_

Yet the only question he really cares about is the one he already asked. The one Jeremy didn’t answer: _why me?_

The answer is probably as simple as Sara telling Jeremy about _L_ _a Malchance._ Sara has the tendency to over-exaggerate Jean’s abilities to everyone she meets, which would explain Jeremy’s insistence that Jean could help. He’s had the same conversation with Sara a dozen times, trying to talk her out of her delusions.

 _I'm not able to read people's minds,_ he always tells her. _I can't actually see the future. I don't have visions or fits or spells or whatever you want to call it - I'm not special._

 _One day,_ she always tells him, _you'll see what I mean._

And Jean always asks: _if I was able to see the future, wouldn't I have already seen that?_

And every time, she laughs. As if seeing the future is one big joke that only she understands, one that’s maybe been lost in translation somewhere along the way. It annoys him more than anything else, to be honest, but it hasn’t stopped her from selling his so-called abilities to any and all patrons that walk through the door of Mme DeVine's. 

He has told her repeatedly that any truth he speaks in his readings is accidental, stumbled upon through vague coincidence and aphorisms that only sound convincing to people who are already desperately grasping at straws. Jean listens to what they say - really _listens_ \- and simply tells them what they want to hear. He watches. He sees what's plain as day: fear, sadness, greed, guilt. He reads between the lines, that’s all. 

It's not magic. It's hardly even talent - it’s a parlor trick. He does what Monsieur R wants from him in order to survive; there's never been much of a choice. All he does is play pretend. Nothing more.

Despite this, for the first time he’s glad for Sara’s stubbornness. It sent Jeremy to his doorstep, after all, and for the first time in months, he has something to look forward to.

He’d forgotten what it felt like to talk to someone who didn’t know how much he hated himself. Someone who looked at him like he was worth talking to instead of a circus act, a freak, a threat. Even if it was because of Sara’s grandiose promises, Jean was intoxicated by Jeremy’s hopefulness that night. Not just intoxicated. _I_ _nfected_. For the first time since arriving at the Rising Sun three years ago, Jean feels a spark in his chest, a flint striking in the darkness of his heart that he long ago accepted as broken. He feels like he's fitting together a puzzle after just being handed the missing piece. This isn’t a performance anymore. He doesn't have to pretend to be useful. Just for tonight, he wants it to be real. He wants to be more than an actor in a show. He wants to be seen and heard and known. Jeremy might’ve been high on Starlight that night when he looked at Jean like he hung the stars, but Jean had been given his first taste of hope in three years. And he’s absolutely addicted to the feeling.

 _Merde._

It doesn't mean anything. He's just tired of feeling so helpless all the time, and tired of the lies. He's tired of clinging to the part of that nineteen year old boy whose mother was dragged away from him while the barrel of a gun was pressed flush against his skin. He's tired of missing the part of himself that felt human, and tired of the knives, the burns, the scars, the sleepless nights and bruises and dark rooms and endless nightmares. He's tired of feeling empty, like he's made of glass and ready to shatter. 

The moment he offered to help Jeremy, he felt the hand of fate like a vice around his neck. A warning, one that he ignored. 

Sara would probably call it a premonition, and that's exactly what Jean is afraid of now.

It’s why he waited so long to tell Kevin, but he manages to work up the courage to knock twice on his bedroom door - their own secret signal.

“What,” Kevin says as he answers the door. The word is a cross demand, hardly a question at all.

"I need a favor," Jean says, hesitating. The other staff are on an extended trip with Monsieur R this afternoon, to the Clairebonne on the other side of the Mississippi. Only Kevin and Jean are left at the Rising Sun, although Marcus is sure to be somewhere downstairs to ensure neither of Monsieur R's most prized possessions get into trouble. 

"Don't we all," Kevin mutters, but he motions for Jean to come in and shut the door behind him. 

For an entire minute, Jean lets himself relax into the familiarity of Kevin’s room. It’s nicer than Jean’s (which isn’t hard to accomplish, since Jean’s room is a glorified prison cell in the hottest part of the attic). Usually, Kevin’s room smells like fresh cut grass and azaleas and rhododendrons, which has always helped to calm Jean. Today, though, there’s a new vial of something foul-smelling from Sara on the windowsill, and the room smells like burnt rot.

Jean blinks, and in the span of a second, a column of flame appears along the curtains. Long, wisp-like ribbons of smoke gather into clouds when they reach the highest parts of the peaked ceiling. 

Then he blinks again and it's gone. Nothing more than a weak _trompe-l'œil_ conjured up by a fragile mind, he tells himself as his heart stops racing.

Kevin, oblivious to Jean's momentary delirium, picks up the vial from the windowsill with two fingers, pulling the dropper out. 

Jean doesn't usually like to indulge Sara's (or Kevin’s) whims. He doesn't take Sara's charms or gifts or poultices or syrups or remedies. He doesn't even let Sara touch him when he's broken, to soothe his wounds with tinctures or solutions or pastes that promise healing. Tonight, he forgets to care, and holds out his hand.

Kevin raises an eyebrow; they both know Jean is averse to anything remotely superstitious, but Kevin knows better than to question Jean. He places a single drop of the brown liquid on Jean’s wrist.

"Rub it in," Kevin tells him. 

Jean does as instructed, rubbing it into his hands, and it helps him remember what he needs to do. "The boy Sara sent last week," he says. "He asked me a question."

"You don't usually care about Sara's clients."

"That hasn’t changed," Jean says. "I don't care"

It's true. Jeremy means nothing to him _(nothing),_ but Jean can’t explain the nuance of his desperation, the growing urge to leave the Rising Sun.

It doesn't help that three years of resentment lie between him and Kevin, a bitter give-and-take of pain and comfort that satisfies neither of them. They’re both puppets on Monsieur R’s strings, and Kevin would not be able to understand why Jean needs this taste of freedom, this little bit of something to call his own. Just as Jean will never understand why Kevin hasn't left the Rising Sun.

Because unlike Jean, Kevin has nothing to hold him here; he has no family left for Monsieur R to destroy. 

Kevin must notice the way Jean’s jaw tenses and flexes, and he sets down Sara's bottle. For all of the oceans of grief that separate them, they still manage to speak the same language on occasion. 

"Sit," Kevin says, patting the couch next to him. Jean does, curling his fingers into the plush red velvet to steady himself as Kevin talks. "The boy was … a friend of Sara's. She said he only wanted a private reading. You know - the usual."

"A friend," Jean repeats. His palms are sweating; he doesn't know if that's because of the strange oil he just rubbed into his skin or his nerves, but he steels himself for what he's about to admit. "I'm meeting him again tonight. Or - technically - tomorrow morning, while everyone is still at the Clairebonne. I want to help him."

Kevin folds his hands and narrows his eyes. When Kevin sits like this - back straight, head up, eyes fierce and dark with something sinister - he looks powerful. He looks like he could kill a man. (He probably can; Jean wouldn't test that hypothesis). He looks _dangerous._

This is the version of Kevin that Jeremy needs, and Jean is glad to see he still exists underneath all of that guilt and regret.

It's also the version that could’ve saved Jean. Resentment spikes through his heart, a brief reminder that Kevin never gave Jean this version of himself, but it's followed by jealousy. Jean doesn’t know what to do with those feelings, so he quickly locks them away in a dark place with every other sharp-edged emotion he choses to avoid, ever cautious of too much introspection of his own faults. 

"Why?" Kevin asks.

Jean tries not to think about the three pearl-handled knives that Kevin keeps in his drawers, but he can’t help but ghost his fingers across his thigh, as though he can feel the scar on his leg through his pants. Kevin raises an eyebrow, taking inventory of Jean’s reaction, but he doesn’t comment on it. 

"Because I want to help him,” Jean says. _Like you should’ve helped me,_ he wants to add. 

"You can't help him. You can’t even help yourself," Kevin says with a scoff. There’s a guilty edge to his voice, though, and it makes Jean’s head spin. For three years, he has let this charade play out between him and Kevin because dissecting it would tear them both apart. They’re both pawns in Monsieur R’s game, but somewhere along the lines, the rules have changed. He’s not sure how the addition of Jeremy affects their equilibrium, but he knows that Kevin always ends up with the upper hand.

A part of him senses Kevin’s reluctance and wonders if it’s because Kevin doesn’t want Jean to leave, even if it’s just for a few hours. A wicked thought crosses Jean’s mind: Kevin hasn’t helped him escape because Kevin doesn’t want to be alone at the Rising Sun.

“Just because I can’t help myself doesn’t mean I can’t help him,” Jean says. “He just wants to know what happened to his father.”

“You’ll fail,” Kevin says, his expression shuttered. He thinks he can get away with saying that sort of thing because he’s right. Jean has told him a thousand times: _just because it’s true, doesn’t mean it can’t hurt._

 _Oh please,_ Kevin will snort in reply. _Y_ _ou’re in denial. Pretending won’t make the truth hurt any less._

In the past, Jean didn’t argue with him. But today, he isn’t backing down so easily.

"So what? At least I’ll have tried. That’s better than doing nothing, _non?”_

Kevin doesn’t blink. His face remains cold and guarded. If Jean hadn’t seen the same expression on Kevin’s face every time Monsieur R came into the room, he would’ve thought Kevin was genuinely cruel. But he’s seen this mask too many times to believe in its authenticity; Kevin might act like words can’t touch him, but he’s always a hair's breadth away from falling apart. 

Less than a hair’s breadth, apparently, because Kevin’s grip tightens on the glass vial still clutched in his hand. It shatters, and suddenly there’s blood and brown liquid and shards of glass on the ground and Kevin’s staring at his bleeding palm like it’s alien to him, disconnected. 

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” Kevin says, watching a thin drop of blood snake down his finger and drip onto the carpet. "Go ahead. See how far _trying_ will get you when Monsieur R has a knife to your throat again."

Slowly, Kevin begins to pick the shards of glass out of his skin, dropping each small piece onto the floor unceremoniously. He doesn’t ask for help, and Jean doesn’t offer any. As usual.

Jean turns to the window to avoid seeing the pain etched across Kevin's face, looking towards the magnolia trees that are almost in full bloom. It's getting colder; the temperature has dropped low enough that goosebumps already crawl up his arms. By midnight, it's supposed to be close to freezing, and most of the flowers will die. By sunrise, the lawn will be littered with baby-pink petals for a few hours, like a blanket of carnival-tinted snow. Then, as soon as the sun comes up and the temperature rises again, the petals will turn brown with rot. 

It's a great and terrible waste, but God, does it look beautiful from up here. 

“You’re going to stain the carpet if you're not careful,” Jean says without looking back. It's easier to survey the front lawns, the sprawling expanse of grass and the cul-de-sac of Lilac Street, than it is to watch Kevin struggle.

"I should've told you earlier,” Kevin says, ignoring Jean’s comment. “Sara asked if you could alter his reading. She wanted you to tell him his father disappeared and tell him to stop looking. I didn't think much of it at the time because she said she would put a small charm in his pocket. I figured one or both of you would get too sick from her charm and nothing would happen. And when I found him that night, he was already drunk on Starlight, so I thought he wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning. And … I mean, he’s too young to get caught up in Monsieur R’s games.”

“Like I was too young?” Jean snaps, unable to keep the resentment out of his voice this time. "Like you were too young?"

“That was different. My - your father -”

“Don't,” Jean interrupts him. “Monsieur R doesn’t need you to excuse his behavior.”

“Jean,” Kevin says, a slight tremble to his voice. _"Jean."_

That's enough to bring Jean's attention back to Kevin, who’s staring at the bloody shards of glass on the floor, his palm still bleeding in several places like he doesn't know what to do next. Kevin's always been better at making messes than cleaning them up, and his face is now bleak, his expression broken. Sometimes, Jean forgets that Kevin’s lived in this house much longer than Jean has. Sometimes, he forgets that Kevin has done things to survive that Jean knows nothing about. 

“Please,” Kevin finally says, holding up his shaking, bloody hand. 

Kevin still can’t look up from the mess, but he doesn’t need to beg twice for Jean to remember all of the times they've exchanged places in this sick game.

Jean gathers the glass carefully, piece by piece, until the carpet is clean, and wraps it all in a tissue before dropping it in the trash. Then, after rummaging through Kevin’s dresser, he finds the old rolls of gauze, the disinfectant and tape, buried beneath holey socks and threadbare undergarments. He works silently: cleaning Kevin’s wounds, pressing clean gauze onto them, taping the makeshift bandages in place. 

“He’ll notice,” Jean says once he’s done. “You won’t be able to hide this.”

“I’ll tell him it was an accident,” Kevin grimaces.

“It _was_ an accident,” Jean says, frowning.

Kevin pauses, finally looking up from his hands. His face is closed off as he slowly repeats, “An accident.” 

Jean doesn’t dare interrupt. He wants Kevin's help with Jeremy more than he wants to discover whatever dangerous truth is lurking beneath those two words. 

“I'll help,” Kevin says after a moment. “But just this once. And only because you asked nicely.”

Jean doesn’t have time to doubt Kevin’s answer, not when the clock is already against them.

 _"Bien,”_ Jean says, all too eager to redirect this conversation back towards Jeremy. “Tell me what you know about Jeremy.” 

“Nothing, really,” Kevin says. “Only what Sara said: that he’s looking for his father. I’d never met him before last week.” 

“But what was she trying to protect him from? Why give him that charm?"

"Jean … this house, it's - the risk is real. She has a right to be scared for him," Kevin says. 

“No,” Jean says, cutting Kevin off before he begins the all-to-familiar lecture about the dangers of the Rising Sun. Before Jean slips up and pulls open his own shirt collar and asks Kevin about the scars on his neck, or pulls up his sleeve to show off the scars down his entire left bicep. Before he slips up and shows Kevin the scars on his heart. 

There are more monsters living in this house than just Monsieur R, and they’ve all left their marks on Jean. 

Kevin presses his lips together, clearly not pleased with being cut off, but he doesn’t restart his lecture.

“Fine,” Kevin acquiesces, moving on. “If not the house, if not you ... I don’t know what she’s protecting him from. The truth, maybe. Your guess is probably as good as mine.”

“Have you ever heard Monsieur R talk about working with Patrick Knox?” Jean asks, ignoring Kevin’s non-answer. 

With a frown, Kevin shakes his head. “I don’t. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t here. It’s not like I know everyone that comes into this house.”

 _“Mais non,”_ Jean says dryly. Kevin rolls his eyes, and Jean notices Kevin’s hands aren’t shaking anymore. 

"Tell me it's safe," Kevin says abruptly. “We’ll go look through the files in his office if you tell me it’s safe.”

They haven't played this game in a long time. 

_Game_ , Jean calls it, because he doesn't think it means anything. It's child’s play, pretending that anything he says while holding Kevin’s hand means anything at all.

"You could just give me the key -"

“No. If you want my help, Jean -" the name is almost a whisper on Kevin’s lips this time, "-then you’ll tell me everything will be okay tonight. You’re not doing this alone."

It's not a promise that Jean wants to make. Something in his gut twists, warning him against it. He can't ensure that Monsieur R stays away as planned, or that Marcus goes to bed at his usual time of 4 AM. He can't ensure that they’ll be able to search through Monsieur R’s files without being caught. He can't promise any of that, and anxiety builds in his chest like a bubble ready to pop.

He takes Kevin’s bandaged hand, draws a cross over the gauze (habits, _habits,_ he can't stop himself after three years of this song and dance) and mumbles, "You'll be safe."

"No," Kevin shakes his head.

"That's what you wanted." Jean is still holding onto Kevin’s hand, confused.

"Safe for _all_ of us," Kevin repeats. 

Jean wants to roll his eyes. His words mean nothing and this is just a _game_ , but Kevin treats Jean’s word as law. If he wants Jean to spell it out, that’s a small price to pay for Kevin’s cooperation, so Jean cooperates.

"We'll _all_ be safe. Happy?" 

Kevin nods once, somberly, signaling for Jean to finish. He does, making another cross on Kevin’s palm and letting go.

Kevin’s responding sneer is a shameless thing, but it’s the first time in a long time he's seen anything resembling a smile from Kevin. 

Monsieur R’s office is just down the hall from Kevin’s room, and the house is eerily quiet as they make their way towards those familiar double doors. For a brief second, Jean’s vision blurs again. This time, a ghostly trail of smoke drifts through the crack between the doors and the floorboards, but when he blinks, it's gone. It's nothing. He shoves open the doors to distract himself from the way his eyes prickle from the phantom stinging sensation. 

He makes his way towards the desk in the middle of Monsieur R’s office, not bothering to wait for Kevin, who has frozen in the doorway. One by one, Jean opens and shuts each desk drawer. There’s typical clutter inside: paper clips, note pads, pencils, a stack of delivery invoices. Boring, but safe. 

It isn’t until he gets to the bottom drawer that Jean freezes in place. 

“Kevin,” he says, nausea quickly rising in the back of his throat. 

Across the room, Kevin is still staring into the middle distance, lost in thought or memory or both. Jean reaches into the drawer, pulling out a heavy glass jar.

It's filled with bones. 

_"Kevin,"_ he repeats, his hands shaking as he holds the jar up to the light.The bones look like fingertips. Or toes, maybe. They're probably human - not that Jean would know how to tell if they weren't. He desperately hopes they’re not. 

"Put it back," Kevin snaps suddenly. The harsh command makes Jean's hand almost slip, but he catches the jar before it falls and quickly deposits it back into the drawer before sliding it shut. “Rule one: don’t touch anything dead.”

“What’s rule two?” Jean asks, a smirk playing at his lips - despite the brief hallucination of smoke, despite the jar of bones he just found, despite his own anxious heartbeat catching in his throat - annoying Kevin has always been amusing. Even when it shouldn’t be. 

“Don’t be an asshole,” Kevin mutters as he opens one of the file cabinets behind the desk. “I doubt he keeps information from three years ago in his desk. Check the other cabinet.” 

He motions to the second file cabinet, and Jean sighs as he opens the top drawer. They work in silence. It’s unusual that the house is this empty, and Jean finds himself distracted by the absence of chaos around them. Several times, he freezes in place, listening for footsteps that may or may not actually exist. Each time, he flinches when he realizes what he’s doing, but a few minutes later, the entire inevitable process repeats all over again. It's maddening, and if he wasn’t so focused on finding _anything_ about the Knox family, he’d be more annoyed with himself. 

Instead, he channels his frustration onto Kevin, who’s slowly flipping through file folders.

“Who is it we’re looking for, again?” he asks Jean for the third time in as many minutes. Jean’s ignored him the past two times, but this time he can’t stop himself. He throws a pen from Monsieur R’s desk at Kevin’s shoulder and ignores the resounding _ow_ that Kevin offers in reply.

“You know damn well what his name is.” 

Kevin throws a dirty look in Jean’s direction, which Jean ignores. It isn’t until he finishes looking through the next drawer that Kevin pauses. 

“Wait,” he says.

Jean doesn’t; he keeps flipping through files methodically, none of them marked with names he recognizes. 

“I don’t -” Kevin stops mid-sentence, pulling out a file from the middle of the drawer and thumbing through it.

He freezes in place, then pulls an entire fistful of files out and spreads them across the desk. This, at least, catches Jean’s attention, and he pauses long enough to shoot Kevin a dirty look.

“Don’t be stupid, Day,” he warns. If they disturb Monsieur R’s desk or put back the files out of order, someone might realize they’ve been in the office. Someone might punish them for it - or, more specifically, punish _Jean._

“Stop,” Kevin says. 

Jean holds his place, sticking his fingers between two files, one labelled _Reynaud, V.,_ the other _Holloway, J._ “Not until we find something on Knox.”

“We need to get out of here,” Kevin says. “This was a mistake. You can't help him. You can't -”

“There’s only a couple more drawers," Jean protests, moving onto the next file in his drawer. _Mazzacane, A._ None of them are alphabetized, and he hasn't figured out how they're organized.

“No,” Kevin says, his voice rigid enough to entice Jean into glancing at the desk to better see the files Kevin laid out. Most of the names are written in crisp block letters. Most of them are written in black, but a few are written in what Jean assumes _(hopes, prays)_ is red ink. None of the names are _Knox_ , but Jean freezes when Kevin flips open one of the files randomly. 

Staring back at them is a photo of what is clearly a dead body, paper clipped to a man's mug shot and a packet of type-written papers. Kevin picks up the photo of the body and turns it over, revealing a single word: _October._

This time it’s Jean’s turn to steady himself, biting back the bile that rises in his throat again. He knew Monsieur R’s business was dirty, but he didn’t expect this. He thought - naively - that the files would be business transactions. Receipts. Invoices. Quarterly reports, tax forms, inventory lists. Whatever it was that businesses needed to survive. Drug shipments, maybe, for Starlight. Tax fraud, probably. But murder? Jean has never seen a dead body before, and Monsieur R never does things by halves.

Still, if he were killing men at the Rising Sun, Jean thinks he would've realized it before now. It's been three years. He doesn't want to believe it.

But as much as he wants to deny the reality in front of him, he can't. He knows the reason he always takes Monsieur R's threats against his parents seriously; he can see the malice, the instability lurking behind Monsieur R's eyes. Far too many times, he has been on the receiving end of that cruelty to deny its existence. For this reason, Jean closes his eyes and takes a deep breath before shutting the file. He has seen too much already, and a sick part of him wonders if there's a file somewhere in there with the name _Moreau._ Jean is anchored by this horrific possibility, his focus fragile, needle-sharp, breakable. 

“We just won't look inside unless we have to,” Jean announces, desperate to continue. “Just read the names. Find Knox.” _Find Moreau,_ but he can't say that aloud.

Kevin isn’t listening. He’s too busy grabbing another handful of files and throwing them on the desk, sifting through the pages. Pictures slide out, and papers start to scatter as Kevin grows more frantic. 

“These are all hits,” Kevin says to himself, ignoring Jean as if he’s not even in the room. “These were _people_ that he _killed._ ”

“Don’t,” Jean says, but Kevin’s breathing is erratic and his hands won’t stop shaking as he throws another file across the desk. An image of scorched earth falls out, just a black circle of ash cut into the ground from some terrible act of violence. He doesn't stop emptying files onto the floor until Jean grabs his wrist, forcing him to stop. 

In the silence that follows, Kevin stares at Jean, while Jean stares at the mess Kevin has made - files overturned, ink spilled across pages, photos jumbled into a pile on the desk, impossible to differentiate one from the next. Jean's stomach lurches sickeningly as he realizes that they’ll never be able to match the photos and papers to the empty file folders correctly, not to mention the damage Kevin has done by stepping on some of the photos, folding them in half or tearing them entirely in two. 

And Kevin - Kevin just stands there amidst the chaos, chest heaving at the eye of the storm. Destruction ripples in the air around them, hot and dry and deadly. Jean stares at the desk, unable to move, unable to process what Kevin has just done. It isn't until he sees that Kevin clutching a single file in his hand that he frowns and steps closer.

"Let me see," Jean says. 

He's picturing the worst already. Maybe Jeremy's father is long dead. Maybe Jeremy is next. Maybe -

Maybe it's not what he expected. 

The name on the front is Day, K. 

Part of him wants to pretend like he doesn't understand what this means. He wants to brush past it and continue pretending like this is about Jeremy and the Knox family. A week ago, Jean might’ve done just that. But tonight, he only watches in abject horror as Kevin slips to his knees, barely an arm’s reach away.

Slowly, Kevin's hand uncurls, and the file falls onto the carpet between them, unopened. Kevin glances sideways at him with a look that says _please_ _,_ but Jean knows how useless it is to beg. His expression falls. 

“It’s your file,” Jean says. 

Kevin doesn’t move towards the file. He stares at it with a vacant look in his eyes. “Haven’t you seen what’s in the other files? I'm not dead.” 

Jean opens his mouth to protest: yes, the other files were filled with death, but it’s Kevin's name on this file. Before he can say anything else, Kevin interrupts him.

“It’s my mother’s,” he says. “Kayleigh Day." 

For a moment, Jean is speechless. That single piece of new information rearranges everything he thought he knew about Kevin. 

Kevin, who had been at the Rising Sun for almost five years by the time Jean arrived. Kevin, who was adopted by Monsieur R’s family after he was orphaned as a teenager. Kevin, who was given the biggest room and best food and freedoms Jean could only dream of. Kevin, who Jean resented - sometimes openly, sometimes secretly. Kevin, who sits in the front room with a magnolia blossom in his hands when he thinks he's alone, who hums Debussy to himself quietly when he's upset. Kevin, who always sneaks extra food for Jean when Monsieur R locks him upstairs for days on end. Kevin, who has silently watched Monsieur R cut Jean, beat Jean, concuss Jean, bruise and break and burn Jean. Kevin, who has always acted like surviving is the worst thing that could happen to a person. 

Kevin, who has kept secrets that could get Jean killed.

Kevin, who is staring at Jean with regret in his eyes. Not surprise, not confusion, not denial or anger or any of the other thousand emotions he should feel if this was new information. The file isn't even open yet, which means Kevin must already know exactly what's inside. 

“What happened?” Jean asks, his words unsteady as he frantically catalogs every assumption he’s made about Kevin, trying to remember what he said about the Day family. _I never knew my father, and when my m_ _other died … I had nowhere else to go to_ _._ Now that he thinks about it, Kevin has never talked about what caused his mother's death. What little information he knows (or thought he knew) came from Monsieur R directly: _i_ _t was a tragic car accident. Kevin was the only one who survived the wreck_. It was easy to believe, and Jean never pushed him to talk about it. He knew that kind of grief could make it difficult to touch certain subjects.

Jean's objection is weak. "But Monsieur R said-" 

He can't finish that sentence. He can't repeat the lies that Monsieur R told him, not when Kevin's expression switches in an instant to bleak nothingness. His gaze focuses upon a spot on the wall behind Jean's head. It's a trick Kevin tried to teach him when he first came to the Rising Sun. _Keep your eyes focused on one spot in the room when he hits you. Pretend like you're just a painted spot on the ceiling, or a speck on the carpet, or a scuff on the baseboards, and they can't hurt_ _you. Pretend that you're safe and eventually, you will be._ It was child's logic, Jean always assumed. A juvenile coping mechanism that Jean never took seriously. He had thought to himself: what had Kevin had to endure that could compare to the pain Monsieur R bestowed upon Jean? His one constant, his only relief, was that no matter how much Monsieur R hurt Jean, he would never hurt Kevin. 

Now, Jean is forced to reconsider all of that. 

"You believed him?" Kevin asks. Then, he repeats it: a statement of fact instead of a question. A disgusted realization. “After everything - _you believed him.”_

Jean doesn’t know what he could possibly say to fix this. They both know Kevin's right, and the ugly truth is dumped out between them, a fleshy thing with a heartbeat of its own that mocks their human fragility. Such emotions as this can't die, but he wants to explain that believing Monsieur R had been less of a choice and more a matter of survival. That Kevin of all people should understand that. But there's always been a divide between the two of them, one that only seems to be growing now. 

“You never said anything about it,” Jean says weakly. It’s a thorny excuse, wrapped so deeply in denial that he barely feels the sting of it himself. “Why didn’t -”

The words choke him off. _Why didn't you tell me?_

As if he has any right to ask.

"You, of all people, should've known better," Kevin says, his voice bitter. " _You._ "

It hits Jean, what Kevin means; he already told Jean all of it. Not in words, but when had they needed something as unreliable as _words_ to understand each other? For three years, they'd shared everything. At least … that's what he used to think. For three years, _Jean_ shared everything. But Kevin didn't. It feels like a sick betrayal of trust, even though Jean has no right to be upset by this. He isn't owed Kevin's tragedy, isn't owed his past, but that doesn't stop him from feeling like he deserves as much. It's messy and codependent and wrong, but Kevin's been the closest thing to family he's had since arriving at the Rising Sun. He can't help the way the room tilts as he tries to piece everything together. 

"Was there ever an accident?" Jean asks numbly, unable to open the file that contains whatever answers he could ask for. _Day, K._ stares up at him in mocking red letters. Kevin rubs the gauze across his palm as though remembering their conversation from earlier. 

"It's never an accident when he's involved," Kevin spits out, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying to block out whatever bloody memory he's currently envisioning. "There are no accidents at the Rising Sun." 

Morbid curiosity still tugs at Jean's attention. He wants to know what happened to Kayleigh, wants to know what Monsieur R wrote in her file after he had her killed. It seems impossibly important to know if there was ever a car, if there was even an ounce of truth in what Monsieur R told him. 

"He's dead," Kevin says abruptly. "Jeremy's father … he's dead."

"You don't know that," Jean says, his objections becoming weaker and weaker as Kevin becomes colder and colder. "I can't tell him unless I'm sure. If there's a even chance -" 

"There's no chance," Kevin says. It's the kind of cold certainty that makes Jean's blood thicken. 

"There's always a chance," Jean says, his voice cracked, and he can't be sure whose family he's talking about anymore. Whose losses are worse, whose pain is greater. 

"I watched her die. I watched him do it." 

There's a period at the end of that sentence, enough to make Jean shut up. 

If he could think straight, he'd try to remember every instance of Kevin standing silent witness to his torture. He'd focus on Kevin's hands (shaking, balled into fists). He'd focus on Kevin's face (steady, only slightly defiant). He'd remember all the times that Kevin wrapped gauze around Jean's broken fingers or split skin. He'd remember Kevin, holding back bile as he wiped the blood and grime from Jean's neck when it got infected during his first week at the Rising Sun. He'd hear Kevin vomiting afterwards, then flushing the toilet and walking into the hallway with a curt _I'm fine._ He'd question why Kevin forced himself to watch each and every time that Jean was pushed to the brink of death, only to nurse him back to health afterwards. He thought Kevin had only watched because of some sick sense of pity, or guilt, from the kind of relief that originates with _better-you-than-me._

If he could, he would remember the first time Kevin watched Monsieur R dig a knife into Jean's side, how when Monsieur R left them alone after, Jean shoved Kevin away when he'd tried to help bandage his ribs. Kevin had been crying, his hands too unsteady to hold the gauze in place. _Y_ _ou're not the one hurting,_ Jean had shouted at him, because Jean always had it worse. 

Because. _Because -_

The fear in Kevin's eyes every time he watched Monsieur R test the limits of Jean's will to live - he had misjudged it. Kevin had never worried that he'd become the target of Monsieur R's violence. It was terror that Kevin would be forced to watch Jean end up like his mother.

It has taken three years for Jean to realize just how brutally efficient Monsieur R is. Every time he was torturing Jean, he was also torturing Kevin, with no extra effort required. Guilt twists in his gut, even though it's never been his fault, per se. He should've been a better friend. 

"What happened to her?"

The file is still sitting between them on the floor, and Jean's fingers ghost across the front of it. He won't open it, not if Kevin doesn't want him to. If the other files are any indication, there will be a picture of a body inside, belonging to Kayleigh. 

"It doesn't matter," Kevin says. "He killed her. And he killed Jeremy's father. It's been three whole years, Jean. There's no other explanation." It's a detached sort of observation that makes him look older than he is, and Jean fills in the blank at the end of that sentence: _he's killed your parents, too._ He doesn't need to say it aloud for Jean to hear it, but he ignores it. He can't think about that right now, so he fills up his fears with anger instead, because one is heavier than the other.

"Why didn't you _tell_ me?" Jean demands, his betrayal turning into near-violence as he tears open a drawer and grabs a fistful of files. He's not looking for _Knox, P.,_ anymore. He's looking for _Moreau._

He wants to blame someone, and Kevin is the easy target. Kevin knows that Jean's attachment to his own life is tenuous at best, often frayed and always threatening to slip away when the scars and pain hang a heavy weight around his neck. Jean regards living like most people regard doctors and dentists: painful but necessary. Sometimes, Jean isn't so sure about living being _necessary,_ but in the past, it's been more of an obligation than anything else, because his continued existence guarantees his parents' survival. At least that's what Monsieur R has always told him.

"I tried - no, really, I _tried,_ Jean."

That sentence guts Jean, because he knows that Kevin is right. He wants to ask Kevin _what was the point?,_ which quickly morphs into _why_ _didn't you let him kill me?_

Except they're not talking about that right now. They're talking about Kevin's dead mother, so Jean simply says, "But you didn't." 

Kevin slumps against the side of the desk, wrapping his arms around his knees as he knots himself into a ball of anxiety. Neither of them can look each other in the eye anymore. 

"I _did_ ," Kevin says. "You didn't want to hear it, or … I don't know. It hurt less to pretend. I didn't want to remember it. I've always wanted to forget. It'd be easier if -" He stops, unable to say what he's thinking. 

" _Dîs-moi,"_ Jean says, slipping into French without meaning to. This entire situation is dangerous - the office, the _Day, K._ file, the language Monsieur R has banned - but there isn't time to calculate the risks. Jean needs to hear it just as badly as Kevin needs to say it aloud. " _Cette fois, dis-moi la vérité."_

"We lived in West Virginia at the time," Kevin says in English, faltering. "The main family estate - Moriyama land, acres of it. My mom's relationship with the Moriyama's became estranged as I grew older. At the time, I didn't understand why. I still don't, but I can guess." Kevin motions to the files spread between them, documenting hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths. "Point is, she wanted to leave. We packed everything we could fit into her car. Only had to wait for an old friend who was going to drive us north, to New York. Maybe across the border, she said. Montreal, or Quebec. Anywhere we wanted, once we were free. That's what she promised."

Kevin takes a deep breath, reaching through his memories for the most painful ones. 

"She said it would all be better once we got away, but I didn't know what she meant. Nothing was _bad_ for me in West Virginia. We had a house and I had friends at school and a bike and a rabbit named Spots. I told her I didn't want to go. She said we had to, that it was for my own good." He pauses. "I tried to run. I told her I hated her, and I ran."

The air is heavy with Kevin's confession. They both suck in a deep breath and wait for the truth to dissipate, but it sticks around like too much humidity in summer. It claws Kevin apart, worse than whatever came next. Her death had happened at Monsieur R's hands, but her pain in _that_ moment, a combination of childish stupidity and shortsightedness, belonged to Kevin. He owned that hurt. Not Monsieur R. 

_"Tu savais pas,"_ Jean mutters quietly. _"Tu n'étais qu'un enfant._ "

"She already had Spots in a cage in the car because she cared, you know? She didn't forget him. She wanted to bring him so I wouldn't miss my old life so much. She was trying to make things better for us but I didn't know that. So I told her I hated her because I was tired of her deciding what was best for me, tired of her telling me what I could and couldn't do. _Don't go on their property past dark. Don't bring anyone home from school. Don't tell anyone where you live. Don't mention the Moriyama name._ She wanted to protect me, but it felt like I was just being suffocated. I hated her. When I said it, I really hated her. I _meant_ it."

Jean takes Kayleigh's file and puts it back into one of the drawers. Wordlessly, he gathers the rest of the files, too, and slips them into place. Not in order, because Kevin's outburst left a hodge-podge of paper across the floor, and Jean's frantic searching had resulted in a scrambled pile of disordered folders and photos and paper, but it's the best either of them can do. Kevin remains motionless the entire time, staring at his hands as if he's just dipped them in blood.

Once he's done, Jean dusts off his hands.

"We should leave," he tells Kevin softly. The house is still quiet, eerily so. Outside, they can hear a mix of gulls and bullfrogs and cicadas and katydids. There's an orchestra of sound in New Orleans, but this pocket of space is suffocating in silence as Jean leads Kevin back to his room. 

"If I could change one thing, I'd change that," Kevin says, still staring at his hands. "I'd tell her I loved her, one last time. So she'd know. I don't think I said it enough -"

"She knew," Jean says. "She knew you loved her." 

He takes Kevin's hand and runs his fingers across the gauze, wondering if Kevin was easier to love as a child, wondering if it's true at all. He's only known Kevin for three pain-filled years, but the idea that a version of Kevin existed that named his _lapin_ Spots suggests that there is a version of Kevin that lived fearlessly. That loved fearlessly, which perhaps explains why Kevin does both in fear now. 

"I loved her," Kevin repeats. 

It's not any consolation, and it's not meant to be. Kevin just needs to say it out loud; Jean understands that. 

Their eyes lock before Kevin slumps down onto his mattress. He remains sitting, but barely, as if he’s held up by a single string, a marionette close to breaking free of its puppeteer. 

“Your parents -” Kevin starts to say. Jean steps closer to shut him up, bumping Kevin’s legs apart until he’s able to kneel between them and stare directly up into Kevin’s tired eyes. The lines on his face are more pronounced up close, the shadows too dark against his skin. Kevin's face is familiar, but tonight, it's not comforting.

Usually, Jean tells Kevin to cut it out, to stop before it's too late. But it's far too late now. After years of carefully avoiding this, they’ve inadvertently stumbled onto an incriminating truth. Jean is tired, more so than usual, and Kevin looks to be on the verge of tears. Jean takes Kevin’s jaw in his palm, a gentle touch at first, but he can’t help himself from tightening his grip as he speaks. 

_"Ne t'en fais pas de ça,”_ Jean says. After a moment, Kevin looks away shamefully, leaning into Jean's touch as he nods silently. A few tears run down Kevin's cheek, pooling against Jean's skin as he runs a thumb across Kevin's jaw slowly.

They stay that way for a matter of minutes, waiting until the truth isn't such an uncomfortable thing, but it won't settle. Whatever shape it has taken, Jean can't swallow it down. Eventually, he lets go of Kevin, and steps away until there’s enough space between them to breathe again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter up in a few weeks (probably early November)!
> 
> French translations:  
> Mme = shorthand for Madame.  
> La malchance = bad luck.  
> Merde = shit.  
> Trompe-l'œil = trick of the eye.  
> Arretez = stop.  
> Mais non = Jean's very sarcastic _no, really?_.  
> Cette fois, dis-moi la vérité = This time, tell me the truth.  
> Tu savais pas/Tu n'étais qu'un enfant = You didn't know, you were only a child.  
> Lapin = rabbit.  
> Ne t'en fais pas de ça = don't worry about that.  
> Thanks again for reading!! <3


	4. Good Morning, New Orleans

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: v*mit mentioned once at the end.

When Friday night comes around, Jeremy sets about putting the kids to bed one at a time, littlest to oldest. Rebecca, thankfully, is already fast asleep on the couch. She's got her thumb in her mouth, and for a moment Jeremy envies her. She's the baby of the family - the youngest - and she was born just months after their father disappeared. She never knew him, which sometimes makes Jeremy sad. Other times, when Jeremy misses their dad so much that it hurts, it makes him glad that she doesn't remember him, that she won't ever miss him in the same way that he does. 

He scoops her into his arms, barely jostling her, and carries her dead weight to bed. Once he's tucked her under the flannel sheet, he runs a soft hand over her forehead, pushing back the all too familiar Knox family curls. 

Next is Anne, who's sitting at the kitchen table with her book. She can't actually read _Anne of Green Gables_ \- she's barely four - but she pretends with such fierce intensity that Jeremy pauses to wonder if he's vastly underestimated her. 

"Bedtime," he says, and Anne groans. The kitchen window is open and Kathleen (presumably collecting frogs on the back step, as usual) also groans.

"Jer," Kathleen shouts from outside, "It's not even dark yet!" 

"It is too," Maggie says from behind Jeremy, and he turns to find her already in her night shirt and a pair of his own oversized shorts. Her night shirt used to be two-sizes too big, but lately it looks like it's shrinking, which can't possibly be true. She'll need a new one soon, he realizes. Just one more expense they can't exactly afford, another to-do on his list that never ends.

"Yeah, listen to Maggie!" Jeremy shouts out the window to Kathleen, who is definitely catching frogs, now that he can see her. A tiny plastic bucket sits next to where she's crouched in the grass. A shadow leaps out of her hands and she swears under her breath, and Jeremy hisses, "Language, Leen."

"Don't call me that!" She shrieks, a frustrated reply. But she tips out the bucket and a tiny tsunami of frogs tumbles out, jumping over each other as they fling themselves free of their plastic trap. "It's not my NAME!" 

Anne has slipped away during all of this, and Jeremy ignores Kathleen's meltdown in favor of finding Anne. She's pretending to sleep in the bed next to Rebecca, with her book clutched against her chest, her eyes shut tightly as she holds her breath. When he tries to take it from her hands gently, she tightens her grip and her eyes spring open, pleading for him to leave it.

"I wanna read," she whines. 

"It's too dark to read," Jeremy explains, tugging on the book again. "You can have it back in the morning."

She nods, which makes Jeremy suspicious. She's not usually so easy to placate, but he'll take this as a win, depositing the book in the kitchen on his way to make sure Kathleen is inside.

She is. And she's angrily chucking her mud-covered boots into the pile by the door before shoving past Jeremy to go to the girls' room. Her temper is par for the course, although he sometimes worries that she's too angry for a seven-year-old. He wouldn't know. He feels like he's barely old enough to call himself an adult. 

When he finds Maggie again, she's brushing her teeth in the bathroom with Georgie, which would be weird if they didn't do absolutely everything together. But lately, Georgie sits outside the door to wait while Maggie pees, so toothbrushing together doesn't mark high on his list of concerns for the twins right now. He hopes it's just a weird phase that they'll grow out of soon. 

Which only leaves Lottie.

Lottie, who's wise beyond her years. Lottie, who's quiet and observant. Lottie, who they all manage to forget about a few times a month at least, when she drifts in and out of rooms soundlessly and says nothing for hours on end. 

Lottie, who's always saved for last: last to get dinner, last to get dessert, last to get new shoes. And usually, last to bed. 

He finds her tucked between the sofa and the wall in barely two square feet of space. Their mother is asleep on the couch, her mouth hanging half open, and Lottie is holding her sketchbook to her chest. In the dim light of the living room lamp, she looks impossibly young. 

"It's time for bed," Jeremy says quietly. "The rest of them are already asleep. Your turn."

Neither of them want to wake their mother, so she gets up and follows him to the kitchen before responding. 

"What about you?" She asks, still holding her sketchbook. Jeremy doesn't know what she draws, but someday, he'd like to see, if she'll show him. For now, she shuts it tightly and curls her fingers around its pages protectively.

"I've got work," he says, resting his hands on the chair that his DeVine's Diner apron is hanging from. It's not entirely a lie - he does have to work, 9 PM to 4 AM, an overnight shift - but afterwards, he's not planning on coming straight home. 

"Work," she says with a frown, resting a hand on his apron. She's twelve - the second oldest, after Jeremy - but she's barely bigger than the twins who are almost four years younger than her. "Why?" 

"Because someone needs to put food on our table and that someone isn’t you. Now git," he says, shooing her to bed. 

She looks skeptical, but takes her sketchbook into the girls' room and shuts the door behind her. After a few moments of listening to sheets rustle and Anne's quiet, _is’at_ _you, Lottie?_ , the house goes quiet. 

He stands in the kitchen alone and pretends that it's just another regular night. He hasn't been sleeping well since his encounter at the Rising Sun, mostly because he's nervous. He wants to know what happened to his father, but he's afraid he won't like what he finds out. Part of him is almost ready to admit that he's been in a holding pattern for the past few years: pretending that he'd like to know, but unwilling to actually do anything about it because he doesn't _really_ want to know. Because he feels like he already knows.

Because not knowing is maybe better than knowing. 

Long enough is long enough, though. The Rising Sun is barely a twenty minute bus ride away from the Knox house, for God's sake. He can't keep avoiding Lilac Street forever, and he doesn't want to admit there are ghosts in this town - in his mind, at the very least - bleeding every last drop of energy out of him by keeping him up at night and planting terrors in his waking mind throughout the day.

No matter what happens, he knows the kids will be alright. Most of them weren't old enough to remember their father when he disappeared. Lottie remembers him, of course, and Jeremy knows she's still waiting for him to come home. She used to be louder, happier, more carefree. Now she's simply not. Not seen, not heard, not listened to. He doesn't want to think too much about the person she would've been right now if their father hadn't disappeared. 

"Jermy?" A small voice says behind him as he's slinging his apron over his shoulder.

"Becca," he says, kneeling down to her level. She's crept out of the girls' room, her curls smushed to one side of her head. She toddles into his arms and he lifts her, balances her on his hip. Immediately, she nestles against his neck, one tiny hand coming to grab his necklace in a surprisingly tight fist, possibly attempting to strangle him as she pulls on it. Jeremy asks, half-choked, "Why are you still up?" 

He's already counting the minutes it'll cost him to change the sheets if she's wet the bed, or how long it'll take her to settle again if she asks for a glass of milk or a bedtime story. If she's found a monster under the bed, it'll be ages. He's definitely going to be late. 

Those are childhood staples he grew up on, memories he wishes he could give her, but he can't. There's not enough of himself to go around between all of the kids, and it feels like he's wearing thin just getting by with the bare minimum. 

Becca doesn't know yet how bad they all have it, though, and she points at the window behind him.

"Sells," she says softly, the word distorted as she sucks her thumb. But Jeremy knows exactly what she means, and he keeps her balanced on his hip as he walks her over to the kitchen window. 

There, above the sink, is a line of thirteen seashells. Some golden, some blue-green, some dirty white, some marbled white-and-black.

He picks the first shell in the line up, and she counts aloud.

"We can count the shells once," he says. "Okay?" 

She nods as he shows her the first shell.

"One," she says in a sleepy voice.

He picks the second shell, and then the third, and she keeps counting, yawning in between, all the way until she can’t count anymore. She forgets the higher numbers sometimes, and he helps her.

"Nine," he says. "Ten. Eleven."

"'leven," she repeats. 

"Yeah, eleven," Jeremy grins. "And twelve. What comes next?"

He holds up the last shell, lucky number thirteen. He found it when they'd gone to Fontainebleau last year. 

"Terteen," she mumbles, her eyes almost shut, her small hand finally loosening its grip on his necklace. 

"Yeah," Jeremy says. "Thirteen. Which means you're safe. You’re all safe tonight. Right?"

But she doesn't hear him. She's already asleep, head lolling against his shoulder as he carries her back to bed. 

\-----

With Monsieur R still out of the house, Jean rides out the wave of cruelty after his talk with Kevin by playing with his clients that evening. And by _playing with,_ he means tormenting. The first man that comes in asks if he'll be rich. Jean tells him a flat no, and when the man sputters in anger, Jean calls for Marcus to drag him out. 

The next one asks about lifting a curse from his family, and Jean says it's impossible. He doesn't bother to say it's impossible to be cursed in the first place, but that's not his problem. (Can’t lift a curse that doesn’t exist, after all). The man wears a sick look on his face when Jean waves him out of the room, too.

The third and fourth ask stupid questions that Jean barely registers, and he dismisses their fears as stupid, naïve, before Marcus removes them from the premises. 

Whatever wordless understanding had passed between him and Kevin earlier is gone. Whatever Kevin had suggested - that Jeremy's father was dead, that Jean's parents were dead - none of it matters anymore. Denial is a powerful drug and Jean is drunk on it right now, desperate to cling to whatever hope he's curated over the years, desperate for his parents to return for him as soon as they're able. 

By the time the evening is over, Jean has all but forgotten everything Kevin said. He waits for the house to grow quiet as the last guests leave, letting his thoughts drift into a cold nothingness that can't hurt him.

For now, he's safe. Monsieur R is still gone, his Cadillac nowhere in sight - Jean checked after his last client, claiming to need a breath of fresh air. Marcus followed him the entryway, watching Jean suspiciously, but didn't protest when Jean stood on the porch and wrapped white-knuckled hands around the banister as he stared down Lilac Street for several long minutes. And until Monsieur R is back, Jean doesn't have to worry about the files stuffed haphazardly into cabinets, all out of order. Until then, Jean can pretend that nothing about this day is peculiar, even though the sky is a violent, churning shade of grey. 

Finally, once he's looked his fill, Jean is ushered back inside by Marcus.

It isn't until Marcus barks, "Up," that Jean realizes he stopped too early, frozen on the second floor landing as he stares out through the large arched window above the front door. Jean grumbles but keeps walking all the way to his tiny windowless box of a room on the third floor. Once inside, the door clicks shut as Marcus takes his leave for the morning.

And then Jean waits. 

His only real possession is an alarm clock, which is only allowed by Monsieur R because it is utilitarian. It tells him to wake up, and tells him when clients are coming, and marks the hours between waking and sleeping. Tonight, he can't risk setting the alarm for five AM because someone else could hear it when it goes off. That doesn't stop him from staring at the minute hand, which ticks slowly across the clock face. 4:02 AM. 4:03 AM. 4:04 AM.

It's not like there's anything else for him to do, and he doesn't want to risk falling asleep.

Eventually, at ten to five, his door clicks open. Jean sits up from where he's been lying on his bed, staring at the clock in his hands. He drops it onto the floor.

He didn't expect Kevin to show up. After everything that happened in Monsieur R's office earlier, Jean wouldn't blame Kevin for backing out. He hasn't earned this kind of loyalty, and waits for Kevin to tell him he's on his own for the morning.

But Kevin says, "Let's go, Moreau."

He's still pale from earlier, and he can’t quite look Jean in the eyes. But he showed up, and that's more than Jean could've asked for. He follows Kevin down the narrow staircase, and they pause before stepping into the second-floor hallway to ensure no one's there. Kevin steps lightly, his bare feet silent as he makes his way towards the back staircase - the one that leads directly to the kitchen and, by extension, the back door, the garden. Jean follows, trying to keep as quiet as possible. 

Kevin pulls the curtains aside when they get to the back door, checking if anyone is out there who shouldn't be. It would be unusual but not impossible - Marcus sometimes sits on the back porch and smokes when he can't sleep. 

Thankfully, the coast is clear today. Unlike the rest of the world that will soon be rising for the new day, the House of the Rising Sun has just settled into a heavy sleep. _That's the cost of doing business all night,_ Jean thinks bitterly to himself. He can feel the pull of fatigue - he's been awake for at least eighteen hours already and his body is aching from it, but the adrenaline of sneaking out is keeping the worst of it at bay.

"I'll knock twice if you need to hide. If someone finds you outside …" Kevin's sentence trails off with a heavy implication. Neither of them want to think about what being caught will mean.

Jean nods soberly. "If you hear someone, get back to your room as soon as possible. If they go looking for me upstairs, there's no way I can sneak up to the third floor unnoticed. But you -"

Kevin nods. It's an unfortunate truth; they both know there's only one staircase to the third floor. One way in, one way out. Kevin’s room on the second floor can be accessed from the grand front staircase, in addition to the back service staircase. It’s not a guarantee that Kevin won't be caught if someone comes home early, but it’s a hell of a lot more of a chance than Jean has.

Kevin nudges Jean gently towards the door.

"Go." 

Jean stops, hopes Kevin will say something (anything) else, but he doesn't. There's very little permission in that word, very little forgiveness, and Jean doesn't know why he's looking for either right now, so he does as he's told and goes.

Outside, the air is frigid. Jean wraps his arms around himself as he wanders towards the back garden, where rows of snowpeas and purple lettuce and yellow potatoes are growing. He finds a secluded spot on the grass behind the gazebo, next to a trellis - a climbing rose, its withered petals frosted over with a thin sheen of ice - that shadows him as he crouches down low. It's only a few moments before he hears footsteps crunching in the grass, and Jean sits up. 

Jeremy is standing in the middle of the garden as bold as brass. It's a clear night, and he's completely exposed in the light of the moon. If anyone inside looked out their window, they'd see a trespasser in the garden.

 _"Merde,"_ Jean hisses, waving his hands to get Jeremy's attention. "Get over here!" 

Jeremy spins around and immediately grins when he spots Jean. It only takes a few seconds before he's crouched next to Jean in the frozen dirt, pushing aside one of the vines on the trellis so he can see Jean better.

"Hi," Jeremy says, holding out his hand. "Nice to see you again."

For a second, Jean thinks he's asking for another reading, but then Jean realizes that it's a friendly gesture, a handshake. 

As would be polite, but Jean isn't in the business of making people feel good. He doesn't offer to shake Jeremy's outstretched hand, but Jeremy isn’t phased. In the back of his mind, Jean chalks it up to Southern manners, something he still hasn’t grown used to after all of his years in New Orleans. The hand-shaking, the pitying smiles and _poor thing_ and _bless your heart,_ and _didn’t your momma teach you better’n that?_ But Jeremy doesn’t critique Jean’s manners. Not openly, at least. 

“Oh, right,” Jeremy offers with a bashful smile, tucking his hands back into his pockets. “I kind of forgot hands are your thing.”

“They're not my thing,” Jean huffs, but he’s already nervously pulling off his gloves, and he drops them unceremoniously in the dirt. It feels strange to be without them around a stranger; unless he’s showering or doing readings, he has been required to wear them at all times for the past three years. It’s been a condition of his position at the Rising Sun - part of the act, to make it more believable. Even around the rest of the staff, Jean is required to keep them on. It feels strangely intimate to show Jeremy this part of himself. It should be unremarkable.

“Anyway, I hate to rush you," Jeremy says. "But I have to be back to get the kids ready for school at -” he glances at his watch, a small golden thing that glints in the moonlight as he checks it “-seven. So I only have two hours.”

His knee hiccups as he waits for Jean's answer.

“What makes you think this will take two hours?” Jean says wearily, because he certainly can’t spend two hours out here without getting caught.

“Dunno,” Jeremy says. “I mean, last time I was in there,” he motions towards the house, “I didn't come out for … six hours? It felt like ten minutes, but it wasn’t. I can’t do that again.”

Jean wants to tell him that was probably the Starlight; it makes time feel insubstantial and flimsy. It makes seconds pass like months and hours pass like minutes. But he’s focused on one thing tonight, and he doesn’t have time for small talk. He doesn't bother with explanations of things that don't matter, jumping straight to the point instead.

“What makes you think your father is alive?” Jean asks. He’s had a lot of time to think about what he would say to Jeremy first, and this seemed like the safest question.

“I don’t,” Jeremy says with a frown. “I always thought I’d feel something, one way or another. I’d feel it in my bones or something if he was dead, you know? It's what everyone says. You just know. But I don't - all I feel is this big, blank nothingness all the time. Maybe that’s a sign that he’s been dead for a long time. Maybe it just means I'm more like my mom than I'd like to admit," he pauses to pinch the bridge of his nose. "Sorry. Didn't come out here to spill all my secrets, right? I don't know to tell if he's dead. I just … it's hope." 

Jeremy rubs the back of his neck as his face flushes, and Jean doesn't say anything. One skill he’s picked up at the Rising Sun is the art of staying quiet. Sometimes, it takes a few minutes of uncomfortable silence before his clients start babbling, but Jeremy doesn’t need much prodding. He continues again after barely taking a breath.

“But I guess you don't need me to tell you that, right? You’d be able to figure that out, seeing as you’re -”

“I’m not anything,” Jean snaps before Jeremy starts throwing around words like _psychic_ or _cursed_ or _inhuman_ or _La Malchance_.

Somewhere in the rush of words, Jeremy's knee presses against Jean's, and it’s making Jean dizzy. He’s used to touch - to hands, and palms and wrists and fingers and skin - but he’s not used to _Jeremy_. Or maybe Sara gave Jeremy another sachet. If she did, he can’t smell it. 

“Did Sara give you something?”

“Sara?” Jeremy asks, frowning at the non-sequitur. “Give me what?”

“Another sachet," Jean says, fidgeting as he tries to explain. "The plants. Like last time.”

“Oh,” Jeremy says. “You mean Alvarez? No, she didn’t give me anything. I didn’t even tell her I was coming back. If I had, she would’ve tried to stop me. Or join me. And I'm not sure which is worse.”

Jean shifts slightly to put some space between them. If it's not Sara making him feel this way, then it's Jeremy. He wonders if this is what infatuation feels like.

He can't sort through those thoughts with Jeremy's nervous energy charging the air. It’s nauseating, and Jean needs a clear head. He doesn’t want to risk being out here for much longer, and Jeremy is wasting what little time they have left by staring at Jean with his head cocked sideways, his hands twisting in his lap. Maybe Jean is wasting it staring right back at him, because he wants to memorize the way Jeremy is looking at him right now, like he _knows_ something. 

The thought is as frustrating as it is unwanted. He’s not usually distracted by clients -not that Jeremy is a client right now, because Jean isn’t working right now _._ He’s trying to make his own decisions for once, but he can’t exactly remember why he thought this would be a good idea while Jeremy is chewing on his lip like that. 

_Focus,_ he tells himself. 

“I need to know more about your father’s disappearance,” Jean says, a little more gruffly than he intended. He doesn’t want to say that he can’t really help Jeremy at all. Kevin’s words from Monsieur R's study rattle around in his brain: _he's probably dead._

“I don’t know how he got involved with the Rising Sun," Jeremy says, and it seems to snap him out of his nerves. Jean is getting the feeling that once Jeremy starts talking, it’s hard to get him to stop. At least it buys Jean some time to figure out what he’s going to say. "But he had been stumbling home drunk at 4 AM for a few months by the time he asked me to drive him here. He said that it was his last visit, and he asked me to wait for him - twenty-five minutes exactly, like I told you last time - and I sat in the car just down the street. By the Fresh Market, you know? And he said no matter what, I needed to stay put, that I shouldn’t go looking for him inside. I didn’t know what he meant at the time - I thought he didn’t want my mother to find out he was drinking or gambling or something. I thought he was going to get drunk and have me drive him home after. I mean, God, I didn’t understand any of this. I was eighteen - I was basically a kid.”

Jean tries to hide his surprise at Jeremy's age. If he was eighteen when his father disappeared three years ago, he has to be around twenty-one now. Almost exactly Jean’s age. Now that he knows Jeremy’s age, Jean can see traces of it: small bags beneath Jeremy’s eyes, the slight wrinkle in the middle of his forehead when he frowns, the callouses on his hands. Or maybe that isn't age. It looks far too much like Jean's own bone-deep exhaustion for his liking, and he has to fight back the urge to ask Jeremy why he's so tired. 

“You’re young,” Jean says, ignoring everything else Jeremy said.

Jeremy pauses, taken aback for a moment.

“And you’re not?” He asks, that tiny frown deepening between his brows. 

Jean grumbles something unintelligible under his breath along the lines of _I’m older than you._ Because Jean isn't young - he hasn’t felt young since his parents disappeared. Being young is a luxury afforded to the privileged, and Jean has been tortured and kept in a glorified shoe box for three years; he does not fit the word _young_ anymore. It’s one of many that he’s outgrown, like too-small shoes that blister his ankles and pinch his toes. Painful when he tries to fit into it. 

Not that he should extend the word _privileged_ to Jeremy. When Jeremy came to the Rising Sun for the first time, he looked like a cartoon. His suit was two sizes too big and cuffed at the ankles, and his shoes were scuffed. He wore it all with great discomfort, but tonight Jeremy is a different beast. His shirt has holes around the hem and it’s well worn, but its faded red color is a perfect complement to his freckles and the flush on his cheeks from the cold. The jeans he’s wearing are still two sizes too big, but there’s a patch on the front pocket that Jeremy keeps worrying between his fingers. But instead of drowning in them, he's wearing them like a security blanket. He’s not tidy like everyone else in Jean's life. 

Like Jean, whose own appearance is tailored to make money and portray Monsieur R’s wealth. He finds himself wondering for a split second what Jeremy sees when he looks at him, and he feels the need to apologize for his too-new clothes and pressed shirts and leather gloves and all-black ensemble.

“What makes you think that your father wasn’t trying to leave your family?” Jean asks, trying to shake himself from all of the distractions Jeremy provides. Strangely, Jeremy doesn’t seem bothered by Jean’s lapses into silence and disjointed questions. “That’s what most of the men at the Rising Sun are looking to do - get drunk, escape for a few hours. Sometimes, when that isn’t enough anymore, they want to disappear. They want to escape whatever made them come here in the first place. They walk away and start over somewhere new. Somewhere else. Who says that wasn't what your father wanted?”

“He wasn’t like that,” Jeremy insists. “He loved us. He worked hard to make sure we had everything we needed.”

“You think the rest of these men didn’t once love their families?” Jean says it bitterly. It strikes a nerve, thinking about the past three years that he’s been waiting for his parents to return. “That is naivety.” He might be talking to Jeremy, but it's like looking in a mirror right now when betrayal flashes across Jeremy's face.

“Why would he ask me to wait for him if he was planning on leaving? He could’ve run off any other night without dragging me into it.”

“Maybe he felt guilty,” Jean offers. 

Jeremy shakes his head. “No. Before he left, he told me to take care of my siblings and my mother. He told me to forget about the Rising Sun. And,” Jeremy pauses, “my mother was pregnant at the time. He never would’ve left her like that. He wasn't like that."

Jean wants to tell him to give up. _It’s easier this way,_ he thinks, but he knows it’s a lie. For the same reason Jean won't give up on his idiotic hope that his parents will return, Jeremy can’t let go of his father. That sick feeling settles back into Jean’s gut. He can't tell Jeremy to give up hope when he can't do the same himself. He’s a fraud, and a failure, because he should've known better than to ask Jeremy back. He doesn't know what he expected, but it wasn't this. 

“This was a mistake,” Jean says suddenly, starting to get up. Jeremy reaches out and catches his wrist, his eyes pleading.

“Could you try?” Jeremy asks, motioning towards Jean's hands. For a reading, Jean realizes belatedly.

He doesn’t want to pretend anymore. He doesn’t want Jeremy to look at him like everyone else at the Rising Sun does, like he has something valuable to offer. He tries to open his mouth, but he can’t. Bile is rising in his throat, and the sky is hazy. When he blinks, the sky changes. Instead of the dark red glow of a late winter sunrise, the sky is filled with stars that twinkle above him. 

Suddenly, Jean gets the feeling that he's here, but not. Jeremy is missing, or maybe it's Jean who's missing.

There's a threateningly low voice from behind the gazebo. Not Kevin, not Jeremy, not Marcus, not even Monsieur R.

 _“It’s over, Moreau,”_ it says. Jean freezes, unwilling to admit he’s been caught. The voice continues. _"Y_ _ou’re already in debt for Madeline. What about your son? You expect us to keep him safe for free, too? Pick one. You can’t afford both, Jacques.”_

Jean stands up abruptly, the stars spinning above his head as he’s thrust into the dead of night. 

_“Papa?”_ He shouts, stumbling into the garden. He tramples on snowpeas, and can feel the _snap_ of their stems as he searches frantically for the source of the unknown voice. A flock of sparrows takes flight from the tree nearby when he shouts again. “ _PAPA_?”

 _"You can't protect him from himself,_ " the voice says.

 _"I_ _can protect him from you,_ " a familiar voice replies. At first, he can't quite place it. Then, like a punch to the gut, it hits him. It's his father's voice. 

He spins around, looking for a glimpse of his father after all these years, but the garden is empty. Slowly, the stars above fade back into the red glow of sunrise, until all traces of night are gone. Just like the voices.

A gentle hand on his shoulder jolts him back to reality, and Jean gags as the world spins around him and Jeremy comes back into focus. 

There's something wrong. That's all he knows - he doesn't know what just happened, or if he'd been driven to the edge of sanity after too much sleep deprivation. There’s no one else outside besides him and Jeremy, but he can't help but frantically searching for his father.

"What's wrong?" Jeremy asks, concern written across his face. 

"My father," Jean mumbles, but he doesn't know if he's said it in English or French, and the sky is still spinning above him as he bends to retch into the garden. He clenches his eyes shut, the pounding of his heart drowning out all of his sensibilities. He stays that way until he can't feel anything but the burn of acid in his throat. 

"Hey," Jeremy's soft voice shushes him. "Hey, it's okay. You're okay. I've got you." 

When Jean is done, he wipes his mouth on his sleeve. Jeremy is still rubbing circles on his back. 

"What happened?" Jeremy asks. 

It's too much. Jean's father, the shifting sky above his head, those words echoing in his mind - _you can't afford both, Jacques._ He needs Jeremy to leave.

“Stop,” Jean says, bucking out of Jeremy's grip. He's panting with exertion, and doesn’t know why he feels so drained all of a sudden. He stumbles backwards, putting as much space as possible between them. “Get away from me - I can't help you anymore.”

Jeremy takes a step back, mirroring Jean's own retreat.

"I don't want -"

“Go,” Jean interrupts with a shaking voice, repeating the command Kevin had given him earlier. He doesn't know if the word is his own or not. 

It doesn't matter.

His hands are trembling, his heart pounding in his chest. This has to be a mistake.

“Don’t come here again," Jean says, tripping over his feet as he hurries back towards the grand house, the House of the Rising Sun. 

He doesn't wait for Jeremy's reaction. He stumbles up the steps and shoves the door open. Kevin is leaning against the oven, chewing on his thumbnail with the radio turned on low in the background. He startles when Jean appears, and they stare at each other as the host chirps, _Good morning, New Orleans! Looks like it's going to be a cold one today! Highs in the upper 40s with a chance of -_

Kevin shuts it off mid-sentence without taking his eyes off of Jean. There's a silent question in his expression, mixed with an accusation - a milder version of _I t_ _old you so._ But Jean doesn't have any answers right now, and Kevin isn't cruel enough to force the issue beyond an impartial shrug as he follows Jean back upstairs. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another month, another chapter!


	5. The 1916 Mercury Dime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> eeek!!! we’re back for chapter 5 :)

Jeremy avoids Alvarez for three whole days after his abysmal visit with Jean at the Rising Sun, which is a feat in itself because she lives above DeVine’s. For each shift, he arrives just minutes before he needs to clock in. And when he’s done, he grabs his bike and is down the street in a matter of seconds. He even swaps his Sunday shift for a Monday to avoid working with her. He minds his own business. He keeps his head down. He doesn’t think about Jean.

But she finally catches up to him on Tuesday, after he's spent eight hours mopping up spills, plucking runaway fries from of the counters, wiping crumbs off of tables with an unpleasantly sticky washrags. He doesn't have it in him to duck under the counter when she bursts through the front door, her curls pulled back into a messy bun as she slips into her apron. 

“Knox. Long time no see,” she says, settling across from him at the counter where he’s drying plastic cups. The vinyl on the stool cracks as she sits, and with a heavy sigh, Jeremy puts down the last cup. 

“I’m busy,” he says. It’s a fragile excuse. Mme DeVine is sitting at the cash register on the other side of the restaurant, and if she heard him say that, she’d tell him to leave the rest for Vince to finish that evening. He glances nervously at her, but she’s busy stapling a thick stack of receipts together and stuffing them into the cash drawer, too preoccupied to notice him and Alvarez talking.

“Right,” Alvarez says with a snort. “Are you going to tell me why you’ve been running out of here at exactly 6pm for the past few days, or am I just supposed to guess?” 

He briefly considers lying. He could pretend that nothing bad happened when he went back to the Rising Sun. And really, nothing had happened at all. He talked with _La Malchance -_ no, with Jean - behind the gazebo for a few minutes. Then Jean had puked in the bushes before running inside without revealing anything useful, and Jeremy had been left alone in the dark to tend to his disappointment alone.

He'd gotten his hopes up so much that Jean's sudden disappearance left him on the verge of tears, not that he wants to admit that to anyone. It wasn’t his proudest moment.

And it's exactly why he's been avoiding Alvarez. She’ll pull the truth out of him in minutes. 

“You were supposed to guess?” Jeremy offers, wincing at the way his voice cracks with uncertainty.

“I went to the Rising Sun yesterday during my shift,” she says. “Kevin ordered delivery. Same as always: a number six with two large chocolate shakes and an extra large fry on the side. It’s weird, you know? Because Kevin hates cheese, but he always orders a number six. A cheeseburger. Do you know who _does_ like cheese, Jer?”

He shakes his head slowly, but he gets the feeling he’s about to find out.

“Jean.”

“Who?” Jeremy feigns ignorance, and Alvarez throws her hands in the air.

“ _Jean,_ you idiot,” she repeats. “Tall French asshole? Thinks he isn’t worth the dirt on his shoes, kept like Rapunzel in the tower for the past three years? _La Malchance?_ Does any of this ring a bell?” 

“Jean,” Jeremy repeats, and Alvarez looks like she wants to strangle him when he tilts his head quizzically. “Jean?” 

“Yes,” she snaps. “Jean. He’s the one who orders the number six. And Kevin said he’s refused to come out of his room since he saw you _on Saturday._ He asked me what you said to him, so I said - because I _know_ you wouldn’t have seen him without telling me - that it wasn't _my_ Jeremy harassing Jean. And you know what Kevin said? He said to me YES, it was my Jeremy. So there I was, standing on the doorstep of the Rising Sun like an idiot with a pair of chocolate shakes melting in my hand because Kevin wouldn’t take them until I told him what you _did,_ except I had no clue what you did so I was just standing there with the shakes -”

Jeremy can tell she’s not done dressing him down, so he waits silently as she takes a deep breath to finish.

“- And then do you know what he said? He said, _you don’t know, do you?_ And I said _OF COURSE_ not. Because why would I lie to Kevin Day? Why would I lie to _him,_ of all people? He’s a _friend,_ Jeremy, and I don't know if you know this, but friends don’t _lie_ to each other. But I guess you seem to have forgotten that, which would explain this whole situation.”

“I didn’t mean to -”

“What? Get involved with things you don't know anything about? Do you know how dangerous that was? Not for you. For _him -_ for Jean."

Jeremy shakes his head, his face hot. He hadn’t realized there had been a risk for Jean; Jean had certainly never said anything of the sort, and he seemed willing enough to help during their first meeting. “What do you mean?”

Alvarez spins around on her stool, motioning for him to follow. She weaves deftly between the red plastic tables, the silver-trimmed jukebox, the stacks of thick white plates in the back, all the way to the storeroom. Cans of tomato sauce and black beans and glass bottles of ketchup line the shelves around them as Alvarez shuts the door.

“You really don’t know?” She asks, arms crossed.

Jeremy shakes his head. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to know. He just knows that he doesn’t know it yet. 

“Your necklace,” she motions, reaching out towards the chain around his neck. 

“My what?” 

He hasn’t thought about his necklace for a long time. It’s almost become a part of himself - he doesn’t even take it off to shower. His fingers run along the chain as Alvarez grabs it and pulls him towards her.

“Take it off,” she growls. 

There’s no hesitation in his movements as he unclasps it and drops it into her waiting hand. She runs her fingers over the chain, settling them on the coin that usually hangs around the base of his throat - an old 1916 dime _. A lucky year_ , his father used to say. _The luckiest,_ Jeremy would parrot back to him. He was little then, barely knee-high, and he holds onto every treasured memory from those days. That necklace was as much a part of his father as the smell of coffee and wood shavings and engine grease. 

And when Jeremy turned sixteen, his father had taken it off at the dinner table. His mother had been pregnant with Anne at the time, and she cried when he clasped it around Jeremy's neck and said, _for_ _luck_. Lottie had objected, since she apparently needed luck just as badly as Jeremy, but his father had only ruffled her hair. _You don't need luck, Lot. Not like Jer does. Have you seen his driving?_ And they all laughed, like it was a big joke they were all in on.

And they were. 

He hasn’t taken it off since, except for the time he had his wisdom teeth removed. Even now, putting it in Alvarez’s hands feels like giving away a piece of himself, but if there's anyone he trusts, it's her.

She holds it up to the light, letting the coin dangle by its chain.

“Why do you wear this?” 

“Because my father gave it to me. It’s lucky.”

“Do you know _why_ it’s lucky?” She asks.

Jeremy shakes his head. He’d never questioned why the 1916 dime in particular was lucky. It simply was, because his father had said so. That was the kind of magic his father had: the kind that made luck real. That was a time when things were uncomplicated - a time that he desperately wants to go back to.

There had never been a reason to question luck when his father was still around, because they'd been bursting at the seams with it. 

“For gamblers,” she explains, “dimes are lucky. But this -” she twirls the necklace “- is a 1916 mercury dime. The luckiest. They first started minting these stupid dimes in 1916, with the winged helmet on the front. And gamblers mistook Lady Liberty for Mercury, the god of Luck. So they thought the dimes were lucky. And because 1916 was a leap year, this particular coin was supposedly the luckiest of all.”

She drops the necklace back into Jeremy’s waiting palm.

“Your father gave you a gambler’s lucky token. I’m assuming it was his own.”

Jeremy nods. It had belonged to his father, but his father never gambled. 

“It wasn't that," he says, stumbling over his words. "It's just - just something he said. He always said 1916 was the luckiest year because his birthday is March 19th and mine is March 16th. That’s all it was - it’s not - not a gambling thing.”

Alvarez leans back against a shelf of silverware rolled in cloth napkins, watching closely as he puts the necklace back on with shaking hands. 

_She's wrong. She knows she's wrong. He wasn't a gambler. He didn't have a problem._

"Jer," she says quietly. "Do you know why Jean is at the Rising Sun?"

"He works there."

She shakes her head sadly. "No."

He doesn't want to ask. He doesn't want to know. He doesn't want to think about his father and gambler's tokens and the Rising Sun and Jean and _La Malchance._

"The Rising Sun is a gambling house," Alvarez says, but Jeremy already knows this. He _knows_ people go there to drink and gamble and lose themselves, but that's not why his father went there. His father wouldn't do that to them. "It's the Starlight that keeps people coming back. It's sweet and addictive and it's supposed to be lucky, but the men who lose thousands of dollars every night don't realize that. They drink it like syrup and hand over stacks of bills until their pockets are empty. More money than you've ever seen in your life, all in one room. The first floor is reserved for drinking, and visiting Jean. The second floor is reserved for ... special requests. And the basement is for gambling.” 

" _La Malchance_ didn't say anything," Jeremy says dumbly.

"Of course not. That's Monsieur R's doing," Alvarez says, the words bitter, like she has half a mind to kill Monsieur R herself.

Jeremy's never _seen_ Monsieur R, for all everyone in the Lilac District talks about him. He's heard a lot, though. Always wearing sunglasses. Always driving a forest-green car. Always smiling, sphynx-like. Always speaking in riddles. Some say he's cruel. Others say he's a genius, as though those two things are mutually exclusive.

"Jean is trapped in that house,” Alvarez explains. “I think his family owed a debt, bigger than any one person could ever hope to repay. And he’s the one stuck paying it off. That's what I heard, anyway. A long time ago. But Kevin's suggested a few times that's not true. That Jean is actually collateral for the return of something the Moreau family stole. And Jean - he's convinced his parents are coming back for him. _La Malchance._ Do you know what it means?" 

Jeremy shakes his head, his hand coming to rest on his necklace instinctively. 

"Bad Luck," she whispers. There's a creeping feeling along Jeremy's spine as he absorbs that information.

Before he can reply, though, someone barges into the storeroom.

"Oh, I didn't realize you guys were - oh, God, sorry, sorry. I didn't see anything," Vince says, backing out with a shit-eating grin as he winks at Jeremy.

"We're not _DOING_ _ANYTHING!"_ Alvarez shouts after Vince, but there's no reply. She sighs and waves a hand at the open door. "Idiot. He acts like he's never met Laila."

Jeremy shrugs, trying to remember what they were saying before the intrusion. 

"Jean - _La Malchance -"_

"He's dangerous. You should stay away." 

With a very small voice, Jeremy replies, "I can't."

Alvarez narrows her eyes, scrutinizing him. "You _like_ him."

"It doesn't matter," Jeremy says. "I don't think he wants to see me again." 

"That's your objection?" Alvarez snorts. "What Jean wants doesn’t matter. As long as he lives in that house, you’ll only ever be a liability to him, Jer. Monsieur R knows how to put pressure where it will hurt the most. That means family. Friends. Your father knew that, which is probably why he told you to stay away. I don't know what happened to him, or what kind of deal he made with Monsieur R, but I'm going to guess it was nothing good. And maybe you should leave it alone, y'know? It's been three years. If he made a deal to keep your family safe, you don’t want to throw that away."

"But you don't _know_ that," Jeremy insists. He doesn't know why he's fighting her on this. For himself, for his father, for Jean and anyone else tormented by that house - it isn't fair. "Monsieur R can't tear families apart like this. He owns a gambling den, so what? They're in every city across the country. He’s not special. My father could still be out there, and Jean -"

"No. You need to stop this. I agreed to set you up with _one_ invitation to the Rising Sun, and that was dangerous enough. Do you think Monsieur R won't get word that you're trying to see his clairvoyant for free? Do you think Jean won't get punished once you're both found out? You think Monsieur R won't come after _you_ for payment, too? I said you had one chance to get an answer, just so you'd stop pining after your dad. But he's not coming back, Jer, okay? Jean was supposed to tell you that. He was supposed to tell you the truth: it doesn't matter what happened in that house three years ago. Your father left. Whether he's dead or not, he left your family behind. And that’s the only truth that matters."

Anger washes over Jeremy as he stands in the doorway of the storeroom. Out of every potential outcome, this is possibly the worst. The one where Alvarez lies to him. The one where she tells him he needs to let go of the past that he's been white-knuckling for three years straight, barely able to drag himself through his day-to-day life because he's caught in another time and place. 

He's been the perfect son for _three years._ He's been the perfect brother, perfect son, perfect employee - on time, never called in sick, never left early. And before that, he was the perfect student. He had a full ride to Mississippi State if he’d graduated high school. _My golden boy,_ his father used to call him. 

But then his father disappeared and his mother fell apart, and someone needed to look after his siblings. He’d never left, in the end. He dropped out of high school two months before graduation, the day their power was shut off for the first time, to work at DeVine's full-time. More than full time. Sixty, seventy hour weeks weren’t uncommon back then, making just enough to get by.

But he’s tired of surviving, and he wants answers. A bitter part of him wants to find his father just so he can shout at him, _Look at me now - look at me. After you left,_ _I_ _picked up the pieces._ _I_ _kept our family together. I did this, when you couldn't. I didn't fucking run, did I?_

He’s been bottling up his anger for years, holding onto the hope that his father is still alive.

And he’s had enough.

"You know what?" He says to Alvarez, balling up his apron and shoving it at her. "Fuck this."

"Jer -" she says, but he's already leaving her behind, slipping out into the restaurant, through the front door, onto his bike. He doesn't care anymore. 

He wants answers, and that's what he will damn well get. No matter the cost. 

\-----

"Jean, you can't stay in your room forever," Kevin says, his voice muffled by the door between them.

Jean is locked in his tiny bedroom for the fifth day in a row. He's spent almost all of his time here, except for the nights that Monsieur R has him entertaining guests downstairs. It's not much of a departure from the usual, but even the rare afternoon spent staring out the front window with Kevin is long gone. 

Tonight, once again, the Rising Sun is going to open its doors to the public. Jean will be traipsed down to his windowless room in the back, shielded by his curtain and candle and the dark cast of shadows upon the walls. He'll take the palms extended towards him with perfunctory reticence, and he'll say what everyone wants to hear. He'll do what's expected of him, if he's able.

But he doesn't know if he's able, since it's been almost an entire week since he last slept more than a few hours at a time. His hands shake with exhaustion or fear or some dangerous combination of the two. 

He doesn't want to tell Kevin that he's terrified to sleep, that he's terrified of being awake, that he's terrified of what he'll say when a man sits at the table in front of him and asks, _tell me why my investments aren't performing.Tell me my future. Tell me my past. Tell me about my luck and my love and my fortune._

He keeps seeing the flash of Jeremy's golden hair, almost silver in the moonlight, the smile on his face turning to concern as Jean hears that haunting voice shouting his father's name. It dogs him, every waking and sleeping moment. Every noise makes him jump. Every door slamming, every command shouted, every knock to announce his meals being delivered - all of it terrifies him. He doesn't know when he'll lose track of reality again, but he feels close to the edge of something enormous, something monstrous. Something that could swallow him whole if he lets it.

_C'est la peur. La folie._

"Go away," he says to Kevin. "I'm not hungry."

"You can't starve yourself."

He very well _can_ starve himself, but that doesn't mean he wants to, and the smell of DeVine's is enticing. Even if his stomach is still in knots, he opens the door a crack. Kevin shoves the greasy bag in first, then uses the momentum to slide himself through, too.

He takes in the sorry state of Jean's room with his hands on his hips. Jean, meanwhile, remains curled in his duvet on the floor next to the door, his mattress shoved against the opposite wall. Out of reach. He doesn't dare sleep on it, too afraid to fall into another nightmare. His alarm clock is next to him, face down so he doesn't have to think too much about the passage of time. 

He pulls a few limp fries out of the bag. "No milkshake?"

"Beggars can't be choosers, Moreau," Kevin says. Jean winces at the name, and Kevin notices - of course he notices. He wastes no time in mentioning it, too. "Tell me what happened."

"Nothing," Jean says as he stuffs more fries into his mouth. 

"It's clearly not _nothing,_ " Kevin says, motioning to the duvet draped over Jean’s shoulders.

He wraps it tighter around himself, protectively. 

"None of your damn business, then," he says, eating to avoid further questions. 

Kevin is unimpressed by his answer, and settles down on the mattress to wait. It isn't until Jean finishes the double cheeseburger that he finally lets go the ping-pong volley of thoughts that have accumulated over the past two weeks. 

"I heard something when I was in the garden with Jeremy.”

Kevin waits for him to continue.

“A voice. _Moreau_ _._ At first, I thought someone had caught me outside, but there was no one there. Still ... it sounded so real, and then they said _Jacques,_ and I knew it was about my father.”

Kevin takes Jean's trash and shoves it into the now-empty bag. He contemplates Jean's hands briefly, the skin-tight gloves stretched taught across his knuckles. 

"You know," Kevin says slowly, "I've tried telling you for years that you're not like everyone else."

"This isn't about me reading palms. I've told you thousand times that what I do in this house is an act. But outside - that wasn't - it wasn't -"

"Palm reading is child's play," Kevin says. "Anyone with half a brain can make up stories about love and fortune and death. You tell people what they want to hear and they listen. You really think that's why Monsieur R has kept you here all these years? Because you read palms?"

Jean scoffs. He _laughs_. It's a dark and bitter sound that rips him in two. 

"No. He keeps me here to make sure my father pays his debt. I'm an expensive and temperamental insurance policy."

The air seems to grow thick around them. A cloud of tension has settled in the room sometime over the past few minutes without Jean noticing. And now that he realizes it's there, he can't stop noticing. He can't help the suffocating feeling that claws at his throat, each breath becoming more and more difficult.

"Don't you think that's a strange reason to keep someone locked in a house for three years?" Kevin asks.

"It's not that complicated.” Jean stands abruptly, and the duvet slips down his shoulders and ends up on the floor. "I'm not whatever it is you and Alvarez think I am. I'm _Jean_. And whatever - whatever happened outside that night can't happen again. It was just ... delirium. Hope. Something dangerous. Disquieting."

He feels the sincerity in his own words. As it is, he's barely slept, barely eaten, barely come out of his room. He's thought of nothing but magnolia petals rotting beneath his feet, tiny bursts of white and pink and brown fluttering to the ground as the frost starts to melt. And then he relives the promise of decay as he vomits into the garden over and over and over again, a single moment in time that won’t stop playing on repeat when he shuts his eyes.

"It was real." 

"It wasn’t real,” Jean snaps at him. 

"Memories," Kevin says, as if that explains anything. "They'd make sense if you let them. Don't you remember when that man sliced his hand open on a champagne glass and you couldn't stop itching yours for days afterwords? Or when Claire screamed when she found the dead cat in the basement and every time you walked by the room for a month, you asked me if I heard the screaming? The past is more real for you than it is for the rest of us.”

"Forget I said anything," Jean says, his voice shaky.

He doesn't have time for Kevin's bizarre theories. This is why he's been locking himself in his room; he doesn't want confirmation that he's lost it. 

"I'm serious," Kevin says.

"So am I," he says. "You're dead wrong about this. The past is nothing to me. It means nothing.” 

He motions towards the door for Kevin to leave. He'd forgotten, briefly, why he'd been avoiding everyone.

Alone in his room, hidden under the covers, he can pretend like the voices he'd heard were figments of his imagination. But with Kevin staring at him, something akin to hope in his eyes, Jean can’t ignore how _real_ the voices sounded that night.

This wasn't the reassurance he needed.

Kevin isn't right about the past. Given another few days of solitude, Jean will be back to his normal self. All of this will become a hazy kind of daydream that he eventually forgets.

"It was the twenty-first," Kevin says, pausing at the door. "When you heard the voices in the garden with Jeremy, it was March twenty-first. Three years to the date since your dad went missing - or, his dad, too, I guess. You don't think that means something?"

Jean doesn't know what to do with that information. There's nothing he _can_ do with it, so he pushes it to the back of his mind. A problem for another day.

"Oh, and Jean -" Kevin slips something out of his pocket, places it on the mattress. It's a sealed envelope, addressed with _Jean Moreau._ "This came from DeVine's."

It isn't until much later that night - into the early hours of the morning, after all the clients have gone and Jean's eyes are ringed with exhaustion - that he runs his fingers over the envelope itself, tracing the letters of his own name over and over again until he falls into a deep sleep.

He dreams of a tiny kitchen he’s never seen before, a dim light burning in the dark above a small table, and thirteen shells lined up in a row on the windowsill. 

\-----

It's hard being in a fight with his best friend. 

Jeremy and Alvarez haven't properly fought in years, which makes it more painful.

She refused to answer her door when he tries to apologize for yelling at her at DeVine’s, and he stopped trying after the second time because she still owes him an apology, too.

Maybe.

He can admit that lately, he's been single-mindedly focused on finding his father. Somehow, as the date grew closer to March 21st, the frantic pace he'd set caught up to him. He thought it would end at the Rising Sun that first night - the night when he first met Jean in the dark room. But it kept going. He kept pushing and pushing until he'd run himself ragged. He'd ignored Alvarez's warnings and ditched their plans to see a movie. Then he forgot that he'd agreed to go with her to Port Arthur for the weekend to see Laila.

He hasn't been a great friend, or even a good friend. He's been self-centered and short-sighted. 

Alvarez isn’t blameless; she tried to manipulate his reading at the Rising Sun, after all, but she'd meant well. Jeremy has been delirious with grandiose plans of finding his father, plans that sifted through his fingers like sand as they fell apart, and she was his antithesis: planning, with careful considering of the consequences and outcomes and likelihoods.

He was a dreamer, drowning in luck and chance.

She was a realist, throwing caution to the wind at every turn.

But it’s their shared stubbornness that has led to their current predicament.

 _Predicament_ being a generous term for being locked in the storeroom by a giggly Vince who'd tricked them each separately into getting more sugar for the shakers on the table. Of course, when Jeremy had a five-pound bag balanced on his shoulder, Alvarez had shoved the door open with a muttered _lazy kid_ towards Vince and stopped in her tracks.

They'd avoided speaking at all during their shared shifts since their argument, each taking refuge on the opposite side of the restaurant from each other: if Alvarez was at the register, Jeremy was sulking in the kitchen, rolling silverware and washing dishes until someone kicked him out. If Jeremy was in the front of house, Alvarez would hole herself up in the storeroom doing inventory for Mme DeVine until someone complained that there were only so many different ways to count tinned tomatoes and hot sauce and sent her back up front to bus tables. 

Apparently, Vince had suffered a serious enough head trauma to mistake Alvarez and Jeremy's distance as a lovers' quarrel - _not_ helped by the scene he was still convinced he'd walked in on last time - and he was playing cupid now. 

"I'll let you out when you've kissed and made up," Vince says through the closed door. "Whatever it is that's got your panties in a bunch, get over it. The rest of us are tired of dealing with your drama."

Alvarez bangs on the door with her fist and when that does nothing, she kicks it for good measure.

"THIS IS SO ILLEGAL!" She shouts, her eyes alight as she looks just about ready to pick up a 64-oz can of tomato paste to chuck at the door. Jeremy stops her just in time, taking it from her hands as he drops the sugar.

"Slow down, Al," he says. "He'll let us out in a few minutes when he gets bored."

"Or he'll forget about us and we'll be locked in here all night," she says, kicking the door again. "DO YOU HEAR THAT, VIN? I'LL KILL YOU MYSELF AS SOON AS THIS DOOR IS OPEN!"

Jeremy slumps to the ground. At least it's a chance to get off his feet. He’s been working twelve hour shifts all week because Maggie and Georgie's class is scheduled for a field trip to Baton Rouge at the end of the month that'll cost more than they have saved up. (And given that their savings usually tallies in the single digits, it's not hard to burn through it quickly.) Plus the electric bill was twice this month what it was last, so they’ve had to scrape by just to keep the heat on this week. 

"This is your fault," she tells him, slumping to the floor. "Talk some sense into him. You have the same dumb boy ideas, full of _oh, this could_ **_never_** _go wrong_. And it's your fault that we're in this situation. If it weren't for you sneaking out to the Rising Sun, Kevin would still be talking to me."

It takes all the concentration he has left, but Jeremy connects the dots. 

"Kevin,” he says. "He’s _still_ mad at you?” 

Alvarez shoots him a chastising look that says: _duh._ If he wasn't exhausted and hungry and tired, Jeremy would be afraid. As it is, he can't be bothered to fight with her anymore, so he tells the truth.

"But I tried to make it better." 

She narrows her eyes at him. "What did you do?"

"I wrote Jean a letter."

She snorts. "You. A letter."

As though those two concepts couldn't be connected. 

"Yes, _me._ It's not like I could call up and ask to speak to him. It was the order you said - number six, two fries. No milkshakes this time, but I figured there's only so many people at the Rising Sun ordering from DeVine's on a Thursday afternoon. So I took a chance and took the food over and when Kevin answered the door, I threw in the letter for Jean. To fix things."

"Fix things," Alvarez repeats again, disdainfully.

He's getting tired of this.

“Yes, so stop acting surprised. I'm sorry, okay? I didn't mean to make things difficult between you and guys. But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop looking for my father, and I think Jean is still the best lead I've had in years."

"He's the _only_ lead you've had in years.”

She's wrong, but he doesn't want to argue this. He doesn't want to think of the hundreds of hours he spent pouring through the obituaries in every county in Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama, as far reaching as Missouri and Florida and Texas, searching for any unidentified bodies that could fit his father's description. He doesn't want to think of the weekends he wasted trying to call his father's distant relatives, asking if they'd heard from him. He doesn't want to think of the nights he spent looking through phone books for a listing for _Knox, Patrick_ in any part of the state, while Georgie slept peacefully in the bed across the room. He's had plenty of leads before. They just never led anywhere useful.

"Jean is different," he says in a quiet voice.

This feels too personal to admit with Vince potentially listening on the other side of the door, so he lowers his voice even more. "Even if he doesn't have the answers now, I can _feel_ them when I'm with him. Like something makes sense that hasn't made sense in a long time."

Alvarez pushes the bag of sugar across the floor with her foot, unwilling to meet his eye.

"What did you say in the letter?" She asks.

"The truth," Jeremy says. "I told him that I believed in him. I told him I wanted to make a deal - I could help him if he could help me."

She considers his response for a few moments, probably trying to figure out what Jeremy could possibly offer a clairvoyant who's trapped by a powerful, mysterious man in an unforgiving house.

"Do you really think you have anything to offer him? That house reeks of darkness - didn't you feel it when you went inside? I can't even get up the front steps some days. It's bad news, you getting involved with this." She shakes her head. "He'd be delusional to accept your offer."

"He already has. Kevin sent back his reply this afternoon when I dropped off an order of fries," he says, pulling the slip of paper from his apron pocket. He's already been worrying it between his fingers, so the ink is a little smudged. 

_Friday morning. 5AM behind the white clapboard house next to the Rising Sun._

_There’s nothing you can help me with._ _I won't ask for anything in return._

_Jean_

She reads it slowly, then folds it and tucks it back into Jeremy's apron pocket right as the door flings open.

"Are you guys - OH," Vince says, his face splitting into a grin when she sees her hand in his apron pocket.

"It's not -" Jeremy starts to say, but Vince is already running down the hallway, shouting _oh my God_ to anyone who will listen. 

"Don't bother," Alvarez mutters. "Let them think whatever they want."

When she stands up, she offers him a hand, and he takes it. 

\-----

By the time 5 AM Friday morning rolls around, Jean is well-rested, despite spending the past twelve hours in the darkest recesses of the House of the Rising Sun. 

The first days after the incident in the garden left him terrified and in a state of constant denial. Now, he's still very much in denial about what Kevin insisted was his _sensitivity_ to the past, as though it was an allergy, a nuisance, a _sneeze._ But he isn't terrified anymore. 

Now, he has a letter.

Not an ordinary letter. He discovered that on accident, having fallen asleep almost immediately after reading Jeremy's letter that first night. While he slept, clutching the letter to his chest, he dreamt of a tiny kitchen, the strange detail in the shells on the window. He felt the dust under his fingertips when he ran his hand across the top of the icebox, and he smelled the stale yeast when he lifted the top of the bread bin on the counter. It was more real than any dream he'd ever had before, like he was inhabiting a still-life. And when he woke, the letter was resting on his chest, untouched.

After that, he didn't deny the magic he felt when he woke from the same dream feeling relaxed the next night and the next. For three years, he'd woken up in a cold sweat, praying the darkness in his room was death instead of night. Three years, he'd spent the first few minutes each morning trying to remember what it was like waking up in the bedroom at his parents' house - the little white clapboard house right next door - breathing in the humid spring air, listening to a delivery van trundle down the street. And sometime during the past three years, he forgot that he was allowed to remember a better time, a better place. He forgot he was allowed to want and wish and need. All it took to remind him was a quiet dream.

It didn't matter if the dream from Jeremy's letter was related to the voices in the garden or not. He would rather not think about it.

He would rather not think about any of this, if he's being honest.

But he's got a plan that loosely involves the tiny clapboard house next door and Jeremy Knox, and maybe their fathers' ghosts.

If he believes in ghosts.

Which he doesn't.

Once again, it's not yet sunrise when he sneaks out the back door. This time, his trek through the garden winds past the storage shed and in the opposite direction of the gazebo. Kevin isn't keeping watch now, because Jean is growing bold in his excursions. He doesn’t want Kevin getting caught if something goes wrong. 

He tries not to think about everything that could go wrong.

 _It'll be fine,_ Kevin told him right before he left. He was perched in the doorway to Jean’s room. _Give me your hand._

Jean offered it, just this once, but Kevin was the one to draw a cross this time.

 _You’ll be fine,_ he said, letting go of Jean’s hand. _Both of you._

The gesture holds a certain everyday magic, and Jean feels those words running through his veins as he sneaks through the line of hedges the separates the Rising Sun's property line from the tiny clapboard house.

A voice startles him half to death when he pops out on the other side.

"23 Lilac Street," Jeremy says. "It's a nice house."

Jean’s heart jumps, beating a frantic warning: _danger, danger, danger._ But Jeremy is oblivious to the breath caugth in Jean's throat, the tension in his shoulders.

"Right," Jean manages through a wheeze when he's able to take half of a terrified breath. "Let's get this over with."

Jeremy says nothing, and motions gallantly for Jean to take the lead. With a final glance over his shoulder, Jean checks that no one's followed them. 

No one has.

23 Lilac Street is unchanged. Ahead of him, the white paint still peels back from the wooden siding. There's a spot on the chimney where the bricks are crumbling a little, and he remembers making a fairy garden with his mother one summer under the kitchen window - far more recently that he'd like to admit. They end up in the backyard to avoid detection, and the silhouette of the tiny house is backlit by the soft glow of the rising sun.

"It's quieter than I remember," Jean says. 

Jeremy kicks at the dirt in reply. "Why here?" 

"I lived here with my parents. Before they - before my father left. Before they took my mother." 

There's not much for either of them to say after that, so Jean tries the lock on the back door. It won’t open, of course, so he tries the windows. Thankfully, his old bedroom window is still warped so the locks don't quite fit snugly, and on the third try, he's able to shove it open a few inches.

The smell that comes from inside the house is stale and dusty and a little warm. It doesn't smell like Jean expected it to, scented with thyme and bolognaise and cardamom and his mother's perfume. He doesn't know why he thought it should still smell that way when no one has lived here in three years, but his disappointment is palpable when he realizes it's a blank smell, a neutral smell.

"Should we go in?”

"Probably," Jean says, but he makes no move towards the half-open window. After an excrutiating silence during which Jean comprehends the ways Monsieur R will kill him if he finds Jean sneaking around 23 Lilac Street, Jeremy stops kicking the dirt and steps closer so he can peer inside. Their shoulders almost brush as Jeremy takes a deep breath.

"I wanted to say that I'm sorry about last time."

"You have nothing to be sorry for," Jean says, eager to put it behind them, but a voice nags at the back of his mind.

_Moreau._

"But I came to you," Jeremy says.

He's so close that Jean notices, for the first time, the thin gold chain of a necklace tucked beneath the collar of Jeremy's jacket. It glints in the moonlight.

Jeremy’s shoulder brushes against Jean’s, and he suddenly hears a whisper of the same voice he hears in the garden. 

_My protection comes at a price that you can't afford._

"And I feel like if I'm going to keep meeting up with you, I should be honest." Jeremy keeps talking, saying things that Jean can't hear.

But the voice he hears next is as familiar as his own.

_It's lilac season in Marseilles, Jean. Have I shown you the pictures of our yard back home? Your grandmere planted a lilac tree right below your window the year that you were born. It still blooms every year, right after your birthday._

"- and it's not fair if I keep asking you -"

"Stop," Jean says, reaching out to grab Jeremy's wrist mid-sentence.

He doesn't mean anything by it, but the sun is suddenly in the sky above him, and in a moment of panic, Jean thinks he's somehow lost the past few hours and botched his nighttime escape from the Rising Sun, or woken up in a strange dreamscape.

Only Jeremy is still standing besides him, and the curious look on his face calms Jean.

His grip on Jeremy’s wrist tightens as he looks around the yard as it’s transformed by the light of day. After a few moments, he closes his eyes and breathes deeply. It smells like summer and fresh-cut grass and lilacs.

_Your father loved the lilac bush back home. It's a shame we don't have any here, isn't it?_

Jean opens his eyes and is immediately transfixed by the scene behind Jeremy. His mother is clipping blossoms from a magnolia tree in full-bloom, with golden sun cobwebbed across her face. Besides her, a teenaged-version of Jean is laying in the grass and staring at the clouds, his hands interlaced behind his head.

 _Jean?_ She asks, turning away from teenaged Jean, looking straight at the back of Jeremy's head.

"Jean?" She repeats, but this time the words come from Jeremy's mouth, in Jeremy's voice. "What's wrong?" 

He tries to say, _I don't know,_ but it comes out garbled. He can't look away from his mother. A pinched frown turns her face shadowy and dark. 

"You're hurting me," his mother says vis-a-vis Jeremy, who looks down at the spot where Jean's hand is clamped around his wrist.

Immediately, Jean lets go, and when he looks back up, searching for the golden sun and the fresh-cut magnolia blossoms and the carefree version of himself that had tan lines on his back and freckles across his shoulders - there's nothing there.

Not nothing.

Jeremy is still there, standing in the darkness and rubbing his wrist. 


End file.
